GETTING INTO CONVERSATIONS with the people who can actually offer you a job is the only way you are going to get hired. The more ways you have of getting into these conversations, the sooner your job search will be over. In the following four chapters you will develop new skills in how to use networking to get names, titles, contact information, and get into conversations with the people who will ultimately hire you.
When you integrate these networking strategies into your job search, you will discover that they can quadruple your odds of getting an interview from any job posting you respond to or from any opening you discover through your own research, networking, or other job search activities. In these chapters you will learn skills with the most effective interview-generating tactics and supercharge your results by learning how to build strong relevant networks and then leveraging them to generate a consistent stream of interviews.
Networking is natural to younger professionals, while for many senior workers it is a function that was never deemed that important. If networking is part of your DNA, you are going to learn how to do it with a focus that will increase your professional stability and growth over the years. If networking is something relatively new in your universe, you will learn the same effective tactics, but first you have to do a headset-reset: You were trained to think that networking wasn’t necessary, that if you worked hard, were loyal, and made sacrifices, you would be rewarded with long-term employment. Those days are gone; no company offers this carrot any longer. We all must accept that job change and even career change are not once-in-a-lifetime events but occur with regularity. Consequently, loyalty to our colleagues will help us through the rough patches of a professional career far better than blind loyalty to a corporation that does not return your good faith.
Nothing happens, no one gets a job interview, and no one gets a job offer without conversations happening. This fact should form the basis of your job search strategy every day:
“Today my primary goal is to get into communication with the people who can hire me as fast and frequently as I can.”
The most effective way to get into direct conversations with those people who hold the job titles that will hire you is to build strong profession-relevant networks. This requires becoming better connected to your professional community so that you can find and reach out to the people in a position to hire you, or who will know the people who can hire you, while simultaneously making it easier for recruiters and headhunters to track you down.
When you connect with your professional community, you get to know, and become known by, all the most dedicated and best-connected professionals in your target geography (where you live and commute). Depending on your needs and the seniority of your position, this may perhaps happen across the entire span of your profession.
There are four types of networks that can be helpful to the success of your job search:
1. Social networks
2. Professional associations
3. Alumni networks
4. Community networks
We will address each of these networks in turn, and discuss how best to leverage your involvement with them.
For corporate recruiters and headhunters, social networking sites are honey pots, offering millions of qualified candidates. For you, social networks provide a reliable pathway to millions of jobs through the people connected to them. Social networking competency is a must for any effective job search plan of attack today. It allows you to reach out to friends, colleagues, and specific categories of as-yet-unknown professional colleagues who might have the perfect lead or introduction.
The better connected you are to your profession, the greater your odds of locating opportunities in the hidden job market. The connections you make can lead to referrals and introductions to recruiters and hiring managers, and in many instances, you’ll be able to bypass the resume banks (always a good thing, even though a Knock ’em Dead resume is designed to be discoverable in resume database searches). You can search a social networking site’s database by job title, company name, zip code, or any keywords of your choice. The database will pull up the profiles of people who match your requirements and allow you to initiate contact directly, through your common membership in groups or through the chain of people who connect you.
For example, a soldier cycling out of the military sought my help in her search for a new civilian career. I took her to www.linkedin.com, the premier professional networking site (about which, more to follow). First, to find other individuals with a similar background, I plugged the word army into the dialogue box and hit enter. The result was more than 4,000 profiles of people who shared her military experience. (That was eight years ago; the same search today produces more than 1,768,000 profiles. LinkedIn now has over 450,000,000 members.) We then tried a search using the phrase information technology (reflecting her desired career change) and got 39,000 profiles (today it is 360,000). While both these potential networks would have relevance to her job search, it got even better when we combined the keywords information technology and army. This pulled up 908 profiles (today over 250,000) of people who shared her life experience and who had, in about half of these results, already made the same transition into her desired profession.
This story illustrates how fast online networking is growing and means that anyone can build relationships and have productive conversations with an enormous number of people, each of whom can be relevant to your job search.
When you are employed and engaged in a confidential job search, a properly constructed social media profile will make you discoverable. Because a social networking site is not a resume database, you do it without an “I’m for sale” sign. Additionally, if you are cycling out of one profession and into another, you can use social networking sites to build a network of people who do the target job in your chosen profession and, whenever possible, people who have made a similar transition—and who can therefore offer you useful advice on making that transition yourself. If you are involved in a job search or a career change, go to the Knock ’em Dead website. We have lots of advice and services to help you through the difficult time of transition.
You’ll find networking sites that cater to an almost limitless array of special interests. There are thousands of these social networks, and the list is growing every day (see Wikipedia entries for a complete list of sites). For the most effective network-integrated job search, you should have a presence on the top four: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Let’s look at each of these in turn.
By far the most important networking site for professionals is LinkedIn. Use it correctly and it could well help you land your next job and sustain your future professional growth. While the following discussion is focused on how best to leverage your presence on LinkedIn, most social networking sites function in very similar ways, and many topics we discuss in connection to LinkedIn will apply to the other networking sites we discuss later.
When you first join a networking site, or finally decide to make something of that terrible profile you currently have, your goals are twofold: You want to be discoverable by recruiters, and you want to develop professional connections that can help you with job search and with other issues that relate to career management. With LinkedIn, as with any social networking site, there are certain steps to take that help you get the most out of your social networking experience:
• Register and create a profile: This gives you a presence so that others can find and connect with you.
• Connect with everyone you know or have worked with in the past.
• Expand your network by joining special-interest groups that are relevant to your profession, and connect with members whose acquaintance could prove mutually beneficial; more on the specifics of whom to connect with shortly.
• Join job search groups for mutual support and tactics. There are many groups; one of them is the Knock ’em Dead Secrets & Strategies group: It’s a friendly, vibrant group that exists to help you with job search and career management issues.
• Link with me personally, which will immediately increase your reach by thousands; I also randomly give books to my connections.
• Engage in social networking activities that will increase your visibility and attract others to you.
All this begins with creating a profile.
There are now well over 420 million LinkedIn users (about half of them in North America) and the site is growing daily, so building a profile that helps you stand out from the crowd will pay real dividends. It is also increasingly common for recruiters and hiring managers to check out your social media profile(s) once they have seen your resume. The profile you create will give you greater visibility with search engines and enable recruiters and others to find you from outside LinkedIn.
Your headshot appears at the top left of your LinkedIn profile, and it’s the first thing recruiters (or anyone else) who visits your profile, or merely discovers it in a list of search results, sees. Additionally, upward of 90 percent of Human Resources pros say they check out social media profiles, especially LinkedIn and Facebook, before inviting a candidate in for an interview. As the face you show to the world, your headshot is the face of your brand.
We all make judgments based on visual first impressions; with search results, a profile with a headshot will get many more clicks than a profile without one, and the people who come to your profile will form an opinion based on your headshot before they read anything you have written. How professional and accessible your headshot makes you look will also color the impressions of anyone who then reads your profile.
This means the wrong headshot could hurt your chances of making the cut. Five out of every ten social media profile headshots make me want to laugh, cry, or lose my lunch. I see headshots that are too close (you want to minimize wrinkles or acne), too distant (I need to see your face), too sexy, too casual, that show you grinning like a congenital imbecile or scowling like a mass murderer. These problem headshots show a lack of appreciation for how important this first impression really is.
We all have different personas at work and at play, so a killer headshot for your Match.com profile could be the kiss of death for your LinkedIn profile. Your social media profile gives the reader visual clues about who you are and what your self-image is. Your appearance and facial expression provide the clues, and these are communicated through your headshot. It will happen whether you want it to or not, so the only smart choice is to make sure your headshot presents a confident professional. If you’re seen as both professional (which implies competence) and friendly, you will encourage acceptance of the claims made within your profile, whereas a too casual or too sexy shot will call your judgment of professional issues into question.
You can probably get a friend/lover/partner to shoot a bunch of photos of you against a plain background, and it will come out as an acceptable candid shot. Since we all need these shots in our professional lives, find a competent headshot photography partner.
KNOCK ’EM DEAD TIP
Can you get away with a DIY headshot? As long as you look professional, the headshot doesn’t have to be done by a professional, but headshots aren’t snapshots, and you should dress for yours as you would for a job interview.
The beauty of a digital camera is that you can take as many shots as you want, pick the best one, and maybe even do some basic cleanups. Shoot straight on and then experiment with distance. Once you’ve settled on a distance (between four and eight feet for many cameras), experiment with angles to see which is most flattering; adjust the lighting to get the most complimentary result.
You need the best headshot you can generate for immediate use, but bear in mind that summer is the best time to upgrade your social media headshots: You look happier and more relaxed because it’s summer, and for paler skin tones, any kind of tan makes you look healthier and more attractive. For more, see the blogs on www.knockemdead.com for the importance of headshots.
After your headshot, the next thing recruiters notice is your headline. This headline should say who you are and what you do. It is important to give recruiters focus, and this is one of the areas the search engine rates as important in establishing your profile’s ranking in searches. This headline is limited to a 120-character thumbnail description about you and works as a brief biography of the person behind the headshot. You have just these 120 characters to say who you are, so your headline should include your Target Job Title and the keywords that capture your most critical skills. You increase the odds of these working well by doing searches on LinkedIn for your own target job title and looking at how the people who show up on the first few pages of results build a winning headline. Use this insight to adapt what you have to offer to synchronize with your findings.
Your headline should use words likely to be used in searches made by recruiters and will include job titles, critical skills, credentials, and/or experience. Never have “looking for opportunity” or anything remotely similar as your headline, as no one uses words like these for a database search, plus it shows how out of touch you are with modern communications media.
You have a huge amount of space in this section, and, consequently, your summary can grow over time as you develop the rest of your profile.
To begin with, you need to give recruiters the right information to make you discoverable. Your LinkedIn profile (as on other social networking sites) provides more space than your tightly focused, job-targeted resume, and you need to take full advantage of this. Start by adding those five or so lines from your primary resume’s Performance Profile, because this is the condensed version of the critical skills and experience that employers seek when looking to hire someone with your title. You should see Knock ’em Dead Resumes for complete details on resume writing; the phrase primary resume relates to the need for each resume to have a specific focus. Add to this any additional information from the Performance Profiles of any additional resumes you might have created. Real estate was at a premium in your resume, so sentences were often truncated; now you can restore them to full sentences.
Use any remaining available space to show critically important skill sets in action. Wherever possible, repeat the keywords your TJD work told you are most important for increasing your discoverability in searches.
The experience section of your profile begins with your work experience. Again, you can cut and paste the entry from your resume first, then add to this with additional information that you feel is relevant.
Review your entries to see if there is additional experience you would like to add. You have plenty of space here, so as long as your headline and entries for each job start with the most important information as determined by your TJD—making your profile more discoverable and a more tempting read for recruiters—you can continue to add additional supporting information you deem important.
The inclusion of keywords in each job’s headline and in the details of that work experience helps make you more visible. This helps recruiters see your claims of professional competency in context and will dramatically increase the frequency of keyword usage. Do this with each job and your discoverability will steadily rise in the results of recruiters’ searches.
Adding skills to your LinkedIn profile has the same benefits as adding them to your resume: They make your profile more visible in database searches and your skills more readily accessible to readers. The number of endorsements you get for your skills increases your visibility. Now while you can add a list of up to fifty skills in the professional skills area of your profile and make it possible for others to add skills I DON’T RECOMMEND IT! Listing fewer skills can mean more endorsements for each skill, and more endorsements help your discoverability.
Limit the skills to those you’ve determined are important to your resume (when you did the Target Job Deconstruction exercise). Fewer options mean more likelihood that the volume of endorsements for those skills will increase at a faster rate. Turn off the option on your Settings page that allows friends and colleagues to add skills as this will only dilute the impact by having a slew of not very important skills that have been endorsed by one or two people—you do not want to underwhelm your readers.
The best way to get these endorsements is to give them to others and then, if someone doesn’t reciprocate in a day or two, to ask her to do so: “Hi Carole, I endorsed your profile for half a dozen skills the other day and wonder if you can do the same for me when you have a moment. Thanks.” The more endorsements you have for your skills, the more discoverable you become to recruiters. As your networks grow, they’ll certainly include others who are in transition, and mutual skill endorsements can help you both.
Start with your highest educational level and work backward. While your educational attainments will usually stop with postsecondary education in your resume, with a LinkedIn profile you might want to consider listing high school as well: This increases your networking opportunities.
Add all your professional certifications; they demonstrate that either your employers, or you personally, have seen fit to invest in your ongoing professional education. They also speak to money that a new employer doesn’t have to invest. Additionally, they can be used by recruiters as search terms, making you more discoverable.
Include membership in any associations or societies, as these are also search terms a recruiter might use, on the assumption that people who belong to professional associations are, by definition, likely to be more committed to—and therefore more up-to-date with—the technical skills of their profession.
Be sure your list includes profession-oriented materials, because the target audiences you want to impress are recruiters and hiring managers.
LinkedIn doesn’t recognize your profile as complete until you have three recommendations, and the more you have, the more discoverable your profile will become. This is in your best interests too, as recommendations from colleagues, coworkers, and past managers give your profile depth and increase your appeal to recruiters. The easiest way to get recommendations is to do them for your colleagues and then ask them to reciprocate. LinkedIn will send a recommendation you write to the recipient and ask him (a) if he would like to upload it, and (b) if he would like to reciprocate. Nevertheless, if the recipient doesn’t reciprocate within a couple of days, send a personal request: You don’t need to tell someone he owes you a reference in return for yours, just that you’d appreciate it.
Uploading your resume to your LI profile is useful because a resume is still the most succinct vehicle for sharing your professional skills, and recruiters will use it for their records and to review with hiring managers. Your resume in turn should have a hyperlink to your LinkedIn profile (beneath your hyperlinked email address). LinkedIn now offers a badge that you paste onto resumes and emails, etc., so that HR or the hiring manager can click through and gather more insight into your potential candidacy.
Your resume in turn should have a hyperlink to your LinkedIn profile (beneath your hyperlinked email address). LinkedIn now offers a graphic that you paste onto resumes and emails, etc. Directions are on your LI “account management page.” This graphic looks much cleaner than a long URL, making it easier for HR or the hiring manager to click through and gather more insight into your potential candidacy.
Always define the professional face you show to the world with your resume and be absolutely certain that every aspect, especially dates and employers, of the LI profile matches the information on your resume—discrepancies encourage red flags about your candidacy.
Every time you change a sentence on your LinkedIn profile and log out, LinkedIn will automatically send a change of status to your network, unless you specify otherwise. As it will take you at least a week or two and many changes to get your profile right, you don’t want your contacts notified every few minutes. To avoid this, go to Settings from the drop-down menu under your name on the top right of your homepage; once the page loads, look for Privacy Controls.
As with all things computer related, if you don’t back up your work, somewhere along the line you are going to lose it. My recommendation is to create your profile in a Microsoft Word document and to back up that document. Then, when you have a complete (and grammatically correct) social media profile in Microsoft Word, it’s ready to be uploaded to this and other social networking sites you might join (after a slight tweaking to create unique content for each of those sites).
At this point you have a profile ready to be optimized for maximum discoverability by search engines. LinkedIn, like all social networking sites, has specific and, annoyingly, ever-changing advice for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), so you should always check the “Help” pages to ensure that you are current. Despite this constantly changing advice, a couple of SEO-worthy actions have remained consistent.
Your headline (coming next to the headshot at the top of your profile) should include your target job title and as many priority skills as space permits. The special skills you list should be those terms you think a recruiter would be most likely to use, based on your findings in the TJD exercise.
Your target job title and these relevant skills are attractive to a search engine, and using them increases your discoverability. So, working through your professional history, for each new job, always fill in the job title and then test how many skills, relevant to your target job, can be added before you run out of space.
LinkedIn does not consider your profile complete until you have at least fifty connections. Therefore you should immediately reach out to anyone with whom you have connections from present or past employers, college or high school, neighbors and friends, and people you have gotten to know through either professional association or local community. Then start connecting with anyone who is working or who has worked with the same employers.
An easy way to discover almost everyone you know who is already on LinkedIn is to use the webmail import feature. This will compare the webmail addresses in your email program with members and tell you of people you’re likely to know.
Once you have reached out to connect with all current and past colleagues, professional acquaintances, and coworkers, it is time to start expanding the depth and breadth of your network to people you don’t know, but who, by virtue of their titles and where they work, you feel might be beneficial to your professional future.
LinkedIn started out saying that you should only connect with people you already know, and it has never changed its stance, so unless they backpedal between my writing and your reading, you may well see this advice when you first join. However, the site’s users have dramatically changed the way that the site is used. It is now common practice and completely allowable to connect with people you don’t know and have never met. Using LinkedIn groups is one of the most effective ways to do this.
LinkedIn only permits you to reach out to someone directly if you know each other or if you have a shared interest, and being a member of the same group counts as that shared interest. LinkedIn has thousands of special-interest groups where you can find exactly the people most likely to shape your future for the better. Group membership allows you to reach out and establish relationships with a very significant cross-section of your professional community. You are allowed to join up to fifty groups and can change the groups you belong to whenever you want. Joining groups that attract people from your profession should be a primary goal.
To connect with people within these groups, you can “like” someone’s comment on one of the discussions (she will be notified and flattered) or even add your own comments. Subsequently, anyone you have complimented in this way can then be approached for a connection in the following thirty-six hours—long enough not to look needy and soon enough that you’ll still be remembered. If the people you want to connect with are group members but not active on the discussion groups, you can also simply approach them for a connection based on your common interests as expressed by your shared membership in that particular group. Once you belong to a group you will have access to a list of the other members.
Almost anyone in your industry or immediate area can be useful, regardless of title or experience, but the people of most interest, the people who, based on your professional goals, hold high-value job titles, are most valuable. They will fall into these categories:
1. People who hold job titles that are one, two, or three levels above your own, because these are the people most likely to be in a position to hire you, now and in the future.
2. Those with the same job title as you, and ideally within your target industry and target geographic location.
3. Those people one job title below yours, and ideally within your target industry and location.
4. Those job titles with whom you would interact on a regular basis at work. They will have different functions and might work in different departments, but they are close enough to potentially hear of opportunities.
People with these job titles are the people most likely to know about suitable opportunities, have the authority to hire you, or have the ability to make a referral or introduction to someone who does.
Apart from finding high-value job titles in groups, you can use the “advanced people search.” You can enter a sequence of varying job titles and/or companies/industries/ geographic areas and expect thousands of responses within seconds.
As people with a lot of connections are typically more active and involved with LinkedIn, go to “sort by” and look for “number of connections,” then start by limiting your search to 500+ connections. Prepare a short and professional invitation, because this sector of the LI community is most likely to accept your request. You can subsequently work your way downward on the connectivity ladder. As you examine your search results in this exercise, you should also check the groups these people belong to, which will either show a bond of interest through common group membership, or alternatively make you aware of groups that might benefit you.
Once you have more than 100 connections, you want to become more focused on finding and connecting with the high-value job titles we discussed earlier. You should always continue to grow your connections, because the greater the number of your contacts, the more people you are able to reach and the wider the range of people to whom you become discoverable.
You can initiate relationships by asking for advice; many people will give you a few minutes of their time, but you will develop the best relationships by reaching out to others with help and advice, because when you offer good things, forging a relationship with you becomes important to the other person.
You can help your growing circle of colleagues who make up the different groups you belong to just by sharing useful information—with the added benefit that you simultaneously increase your credibility and visibility. We are all drowning in Internet-delivered information, and whatever your profession, it undoubtedly has its fair share of bloggers and curators (re-posters) of content.
One option is to identify half a dozen respected resources; for example, if you are sharing business issues, you can’t go wrong linking to the Harvard Business Review, and the mere fact that you refer to them on a regular basis (as we do on the Knock ’em Dead blog) is seen as evidence that you are someone who keeps abreast of the important topics with reliable commentators. All you have to do is write a post that consists of a sentence or two that says why you think a particular article or topic is interesting, and then add a link to the source. In effect, you are making intelligent posts by curating the work of others.
People change jobs on average every four years, only sometimes by choice, and this means making occasional intelligent posts about career issues can also increase your visibility and credibility. You get points for perception but don’t waste job search time writing the damn things.
An alternative is to use Google Alerts. With this option, you click on Alerts on Google.com and enter search terms that are of professional interest to you and others in your profession. Google will send you links to matching results. One word of caution: stay away from politics, religion, and sex; they will all damage your professional reputation. We’ll discuss further tools for curating profession-relevant information over the coming chapters.
When you find an online job posting that seems like a good fit, you are usually faced with uploading your resume into a corporate or headhunter database . . . and then waiting and waiting for a response. However, your social networks can quite possibly deliver direct contact with the people who can hire you or the people who know the people who can hire you. On all of your social networking sites, you can find people who work at your “companies of interest” or have done so in the past. Search for them, using the company name in your keyword search, then look for job titles one, two, and three levels above your own; for titles at your rank and a level below it; and for job titles that interact with yours on a regular basis.
Once you have identified profiles of desirable titleholders, you can approach them to connect. You can do this based on your common professional interests or shared group membership, or with an email stating your professional interests. Check out Knock ’em Dead Job Search Letter Templates for sample social networking letters.
LinkedIn, like most social networking sites, offers an array of tools for your professional networking activities:
• Job postings from employers and headhunters
• Reminders of when to nurture your relationships with a follow-up call or email
• Thousands of special-interest groups
• Links to job sites
• Offline social events to network in person
LinkedIn is just one of hundreds of social networking sites, and you’ll find that most follow the same general format and request the same topics of information. We will move on now to examine the other three major social networking sites: Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. Because much of the profile information you’ll be requested to provide will mirror what you needed to create your LinkedIn profile, we will focus on the variations that make these other sites different.
Many people are leery of using Facebook as a serious professional networking platform. However, if you do—and you should—you need to keep your profile professional in word and tone.
Many of the sections of your Facebook profile correspond to similar ones already discussed in the previous section on LinkedIn, so we’ll focus on those portions of the profile that are unique to Facebook.
On Facebook your profile appears under the heading Timeline. While it allows you to include all the professional information you’d expect on LinkedIn or Google+, Facebook focuses on your personal life by encouraging casual photos (which you should approach with professional caution), showing your recent activities (keep them professional), whom you recently connected with (like the other sites), whom and what you have recently liked, what you’ve been watching on Netflix or Hulu, and the music you’ve been listening to on Spotify. Like LinkedIn, you can show covers of books you’ve recently read (a good advertisement opportunity for your dedication to professional matters).
Now you can hide or highlight these and many more features, but talking about and sharing your tastes and the most personal information about yourself is strangely addictive. To help yourself focus on the professional image you want to promote, keep this thought in mind: You are trying to get hired, not dated. In a couple of paragraphs, we’ll discuss an app that helps you keep things professional.
Recruiters search by skills and by geographic location (to avoid relocation costs), so you should provide the name of your current city of residence. In an age in which relocation is seen as a barrier to recruitment, I have known professionals in transition who are intent on moving from say, Phoenix to Nashville, listing Nashville as their current residence to overcome that barrier. I’m not recommending this, but people are doing it.
If you grew up with social networking, there are probably details of your wilder times available online for the world to see. You need to do searches for yourself to discover exactly what is out there about you, and when you find something that is inappropriate for your professional image, go back and clean up your digital dirt.
A while back I appeared at a major convention for college career services and corporate campus recruiters. It was noted at the conference that upward of 80 percent of recruiters are using publicly available online data about short-list candidates as a screening tool. Twenty-five percent said they would reject a candidate based on this information. This means we all have to police the image we have online, so delete those once-amusing pictures of you projectile vomiting at a frat party.
Your mantra needs to be: Cause the least offense to the greatest majority of people. For professional networking purposes, you should leave out references to sexual, political, or religious issues, because whatever your POV is, it is guaranteed to offend someone who might otherwise offer you a great professional opportunity. Your profile can still represent the real you without causing offense in these areas. A neat app called Reppler will review your profiles, help you manage your online image across all social networks, and alert you to questionable content.
If you are determined to include content that common sense or Reppler finds questionable, make sure that your privacy settings are very strict. Set them to just “friends”; even “friends of friends” opens you up to danger. With the friends only setting, employers won’t be able to see the details of your profile, your photos, or your personal status updates.
On your Account page, choose Edit Friends from the drop-down menu, then Create List. For employers and recruiters, you can create a High-Value Titles or Restricted list and add them to that (when we come to Google+, we’ll do something similar and put all your high-value management connections in their own Circle). Make sure that this Circle (on Facebook, your High-Value Titles or Restricted list) receives only audience-appropriate posts from you. People on this list will only see posts you tag as “public.”
Also, if you have connections with crazies who have no concern for their professional reputation or who post sexual, religious, or political comments or comments about employers or coworkers, you can deactivate your “wall” until you land that new job.
Facebook is one of the biggest websites in the world, and your profile is one of hundreds of millions. In effect, you are a single indistinguishable stalk of wheat in the vast prairie lands of America. This means that unless someone is looking for you in particular, recruiters’ searches for your professional skill set will only find you when you do everything you can to make yourself discoverable, both with the profile you create and by the activities you engage in on Facebook.
First, your Facebook profile, along with your posts (clean up any questionable past comments), needs to complement the messaging you have on LinkedIn, Google+, and any other social networking sites. While the information you share and how you share it can vary, the messages you send and comment on should be compatible with your established professional brand and the messaging you use on all your social media sites.
About 80 percent of American companies, beyond local mom-and-pop operations, have a social media presence on one or more of the big four social recruiting sites. While eight out of ten use social media to recruit, a recent study of corporate recruiters found that 87 percent of those who used social media as a recruitment tool said that the best way to get on company radar is to “Like” the company’s page.
If you take the time to identify desirable employers in your target job search area, you can then visit each of your social networking sites, search for that company’s homepage, and “follow” them.
If you choose to follow that company’s page, their posts will show up in your newsfeed under their list heading.
This allows you to become much more visible to that company’s recruiters by responding to comments and posting questions (non-self-serving) of your own. When company recruiters make posts, add a “like” to the post and, when appropriate, make an intelligent comment or ask a question; this will increase your visibility. Because social media is still new as a recruiting tool, recruiters are excited about it and want success stories. They pay attention to their social media company pages—and that certainly can’t hurt your candidacy.
Any “games” you find on a company page are extremely likely to be tied to skills and aptitude testing, so if you play them, expect your involvement to be part of the recruitment process. Don’t leave anything unfinished, and “play” like the serious professional you are. An interesting approach I’ve heard to gaming these disguised aptitude tests is to have a friend who would never be interested in this company permit you to log in under his name. This allows you to preview the test before taking it under your own name. Sneaky, I know, but isn’t the company being equally sneaky by not being upfront about their intent? Remember the MeInc. philosophy? If so, you’ll recognize that what is good for one company is good for another, and this activity falls under the heading of “competitive intelligence.”
For like-minded people who may not initially know each other, LinkedIn has Groups, Facebook has Communities, and Google+ has Circles and Communities. These pages all work in similar ways and offer similar benefits. You add value to a Community when you “like” existing discussions, comment on them positively, or start your own discussions. When you do this, you also become more visible, and if your comments/discussions are carefully thought out, they can impress recruiters and professional colleagues, thus improving your credibility.
By the time you read this, Facebook could have over 3 million jobs posted, and there are a growing number of apps that can be useful in your job search.
When you see an interesting opportunity, you can flag it and use Graph Search to find connections. For example, if you see a job with Bloomberg Media, you can ask it to search for “Bloomberg”; it will search all your connections for people who work or have worked there. You can also use Graph Search to find Facebook members who work at that company and view their public information (such as groups they are involved with). This can open the door to conversation and connection. This app also allows you to find companies and analyze the personal interests of its employees.
SimplyHired is a job aggregator that cruises around 4,000 sites on your behalf. The neat wrinkle here is that when you sign in with your Facebook account, you can see jobs available at your friends’ employers. Of course, these friends can give you introductions.
This is an easy way to search for jobs and apply without leaving your computer.
This app uses your Facebook friends’ work information to find potential job opportunities within your network.
You can select advanced search options (keyword, location, etc.) on Monster, Simply Hired, CareerBuilder, and more.
This is a good one. It allows companies to automatically publish jobs from their corporate websites onto their Facebook Fan pages. Headhunters use this tool too.
BranchOut, Facebook’s app for professional networking, is designed to help you leverage your social networks for job search and professional development, and it’s quite impressive. It currently has more than 800 million professional profiles, and it’s growing every day. It’s the largest networking service on Facebook. You can use it in a couple of valuable ways:
• To search for job postings
• To search for connections at these companies
When you create a brief professional profile on BranchOut, you become visible to the hordes of recruiters who search this enormous database every day.
Social Jobs connects you to open positions where you live.
I don’t think Facebook is going to surpass LinkedIn as the number one professional networking site just yet. However, it is becoming more useful every day and should definitely be part of your networking plan of attack. With the tactics we’ve discussed and the growing list of tools built for the site, the odds of Facebook adding real value to your search are now steadily improving. Just remember that Facebook really is geared to the social side of life, and while it is developing assets focused on the professional side, you still have to be careful not to get wooed into making inappropriate comments.
When Twitter first launched, it wasn’t immediately clear how the service could be used effectively by job hunters or professionals looking for new career management tools. Gradually, though, useful applications evolved, and now the service has a real role in both job search and career management.
“Tweeting” is Twitter slang for making a post. Twitter allows a user to make tweets of 140 characters, including spaces and a hyperlink. You can’t say much of weight in 140 characters.
Twitter is useful in a job search for tracking companies, recruiters, headhunters, and the activities of high-value job titles in your profession. You can, of course, also tweet to your heart’s content, but using Twitter to listen to what your professional world is doing will lead you to companies, jobs, and recruiters of interest. Once you have created a profile and begun to identify the companies and high-value people to whom you want to become visible, intelligent tweeting activities can put you on the radar of high-value contacts in a way that showcases your professional persona as thoroughly engaged and committed—not necessarily by what you say but by the questions you ask and the worthy comments of others you pass along with your tweets.
Many of the sections required for your Twitter profile correspond to the components we discussed in your other social media profiles, so in our discussion of Twitter, we’ll just look at those parts of the profile where Twitter adds new twists to the conversation.
When you sign up for Twitter, you have to select a “Twitter handle,” which is the name you become known by when you tweet (express your own thoughts) or retweet (share the thoughts and information of others). The same considerations apply here as applied to your headline on LinkedIn and our discussions on appropriate email addresses; your presence is profession oriented, so your handle should speak to your job and your profession in some way. Checking out the Twitter handles of other people in your profession can also give you ideas for handles that support rather than hurt your brand.
Your bio should state your job title and capture the essence of your responsibilities and your work capabilities, and do so in an informal, “cut-to-the-chase” manner reflective of the Twitter approach to communication. If you accept the common-sense approach of the Knock ’em Dead career management philosophy, you will have completed a TJD on your target job (as we discussed in Chapter 3) as the first step in creating social media profiles that speak with a consistent voice about your professional persona. Read a few Twitter profiles and then, using your TJD information, edit your profile to match Twitter’s informal style to the extent you can without sounding unprofessional.
It is acceptable to announce that you are in transition and looking for new opportunities; mostly this will be seen by the people with whom you have established connections, but with the right hashtags you will get the attention of a wider audience that was not previously aware of you.
The big problem with all social media is filtering out the white noise of irrelevant information. Hashtags—searchable terms used in tweets and identified by a preceding pound sign (for example: #jobsearch or #accountantjobs)—help the Twitter search engine categorize and find messages that follow a common theme.
You can use hashtag terms to find job opportunities and profession-relevant information. You can also use them in your tweets to share information with your own followers, as well as to attract new followers who have similar interests. They can help build your Twitter network with a relevant and distinct focus. You can use them anywhere in a tweet: at the beginning, middle, or end. You can increase your visibility with recruiters who are looking for people like you with hashtags like:
• #resume.
• #profile, #linkedin, #google+, #facebook.
• #accountant. Or whatever your job title may be. Recruiters will look for people by their job title, and using an appropriate hashtag helps them find you.
• # “A key skill.” If you possess an in-demand skill, there’s an excellent chance recruiters will be using that as a search term. Placing a hashtag in front of that word or phrase makes it, and you, more discoverable. For example: #MBA, #Leanmanagement, #datasourcing.
Some people recommend hashtags such as #unemployed or #needajob, but I feel these make you sound altogether hopeless. They’re the online version of that poor homeless person’s sign reading: “Will work for food.” To find more useful hashtags for job seekers, Google: “popular job search hashtags.”
Companies and headhunters use Twitter to post jobs because it is a fast, cheap, and effective way to get the word out to a large audience. You will use it to:
• Learn about job opportunities
• Share the ones that aren’t right for you as you retweet and mention them in your other social networking activities
• Retweet the more interesting announcements from companies in your profession
If you use the direct research and approach tactics I address in Chapter 6, by the time you start using Twitter you will have identified every company of interest and every headhunter who works within the target location of your job search. You can then find and follow them on Twitter. Once identified, you can get their tweets linked to your Twitter feed, so that their tweets come to you automatically for review at your convenience.
Recruiters tweet about specific job openings and, to a lesser degree, general information of interest to their target audience. Following a company on Twitter also gives you insight into its activities and culture, and these insights can help you tailor your communications with that company.
Recruiters will notice that you are a follower and that you “like” and retweet their posts. This will lead them to look at your tweets and profile; in other words, it increases your visibility and credibility.
By following companies and individual recruiters, you will hear about job openings. When they aren’t relevant to your needs but might be helpful to your network, you should retweet them (as you should a recruiter’s other profession-related tweets). This will raise your visibility with the company recruiters (to say nothing of strengthening your network).
Some of the common hashtags used by employers to make their employment needs more discoverable include:
#hiring
#joblisting
#jobopening
#jobpostings
#employment
#opportunity
You can use these hashtags as search terms, both on their own and followed by a job title and/or key skills.
Apps that help you discover and track jobs can be a great timesaver. You should check out:
• Jobmob.co.il
• @linkedin_job
• JobShouts
• MicroJobs
All of these apps help you find job openings and you can find plenty more when on Twitter or by doing a Google search.
Next to informing you about job opportunities, your Twitter presence is best suited to helping increase your visibility and credibility by allowing you to share professionally relevant information and resources with a wider audience.
To become a source of interest to others who don’t know you personally, the focus of your tweets has to be professional and relevant. You can tweet fifty times a day if you want, but tweeting takes time, and many recruiters and others in your profession will wonder what you are doing for a living, or for your job search, if you spend all day tweeting.
Twitter only allows tweets of 140 characters including a link, and this limitation requires you to be concise in everything you say; as of this writing, Twitter is about to enable a new feature that allows longer tweets. As the purpose of any tweet is to drive the reader to more detailed information, try to think of your tweets as headlines. Many Twitter users feel that posing a headline as a question draws people to click on a link to discover the answer.
Your tweets need to demonstrate that you have strong written communication skills for the medium. Twitter has rules that are different from traditional communication, so when you can’t get your tweet and hyperlink into the allowed 140 characters including spaces, start abbreviating. This link will give you some more good ideas about how to communicate effectively with 140-character-or-less tweets: www.pardot.com/blog/8-ways-cram-tweets-140-characters-2/.
Hyperlinks can be very long, and your 140 character–limited tweets must also include the link you want readers to follow for more detailed information. Fortunately, there are tools called URL shorteners that compress your links, such as Bitly. You copy the original link into a dialogue box, and within seconds Bitly delivers a compressed version comprising just a few characters.
All professional jobs require good judgment and a positive attitude, so keep your tweets free of negativity, questionable comments, and absolutely stay away from politics or religion because, whatever your beliefs on these issues, you are guaranteed to annoy at least 50 percent of your audience.
Following experts prominent in your profession gives you content to retweet that adds to your credibility and puts you in good company. By consistently sharing intelligent commentary on your profession and its issues, you might not become an overnight industry expert, but you will be taken that much more seriously by those who could hire you. Here are some good sites for finding these experts:
• Twellow
• Muck Rack
• Twiangulate
• Moz.com
The Internet has given us a world in which anyone can state that he is the world’s greatest authority on whatever grabs his fancy, but that doesn’t necessarily make it so. For example, The Daily Muse, a usually carefully researched publication, recently advised unemployed people that they could pick up a few bucks on the side by promoting themselves as coaches! Verify the credentials of the people you listen to and subsequently quote in your tweets and posts on other social networking sites, because to people you don’t know, you are who you quote. You don’t want to be caught quoting such instant experts—professionals can tell the difference.
The bigger your network, the more likely you are to have an inside connection at companies you’d like to approach. Look for friends and colleagues, coworkers, former managers, college friends, and so on. Re-establishing connections with people you’ve known allows you to ask what they are doing and share what you are doing, and these contacts will in turn bring you within reach of new potential connections.
Recruiters live on social media sites, so you can find headhunters and corporate recruiters who work in your profession and target geography and add them as friends. With a friend request, always add a personal note explaining why you want to add her or him as a friend. Headhunters’ and recruiters’ lifeblood is connectivity, so most will accept. With that connection you have just gotten that much closer to starting a conversation that could lead to interviews and job offers.
With social networking, being helpful and paying it forward is important. Read your connections’ updates regularly, “like” them, and whenever you can offer help, do so.
If you are in a job search, you should also add two or three search-related posts each week, generated from the resources we discussed earlier. That may seem like overkill, but people are forgetful, and while you might write three status updates, that doesn’t mean all your contacts read or see any of them. By updating your network with your job search updates, you stay in the forefront of their minds. Hootsuite saves you time and enables you to manage your social networks by posting comments across all your social networking sites at once.
Google+ is the least important of the four major social media platforms, but it is valuable once you have the top three set up, functioning, and under control. Google+ has a professional focus similar to LinkedIn but combines it with many of Facebook’s attractions. Google+ also makes it easy to locate and connect with relevant and high-value professionals you don’t know without requiring an introduction. If you have a free Gmail account, you automatically have a Google+ account—you just have to complete your profile and then become part of the Google+ networking community.
Many of the sections of your Google+ profile correspond to similar ones already discussed in the section on LinkedIn, so here we will only discuss features unique to Google+. However, your Google+ profile shouldn’t be an exact replica of your LinkedIn profile. The Google search engine algorithms don’t give you points for exact duplication. In fact, some authorities claim you will be penalized. Unfortunately, to stop people gaming their algorithms, Google isn’t precise on how they track this issue. However, Sergey Brin, one of Google’s founders, when talking about blogs, suggested that as long as the first paragraph or two aren’t identically worded, you should be all right. It’s safe to assume this advice holds for other documents on Google+.
Do not use your employer’s phone number, but rather use your landline at home or your cell phone number—as long as either of these is unknown to your employer. If both numbers are known, consider buying one of those cheap burner phones, which will give you a unique number and the ability to take messages. You can find more information on phones and confidentiality in Chapter 6.
When transferring your work history from LinkedIn to Google+, watch out for dates and employer names. When moving between different social media profiles and your resume, the number of your jobs and employment dates can easily get jumbled. You must exercise extreme caution in ensuring that this does not happen, as such discrepancies can get your candidacy dismissed from consideration.
Link to your other social networking profiles if they don’t conflict with your central messaging and do add fresh but complementary views of you. From a practical perspective, if you create profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, over time there will be inconsistencies. So whenever you update one profile, review it against the others for consistency.
Offer links to any blogs, websites, articles, books, or patents you created or have contributed to. This helps people learn more about your knowledge and professionalism, and also helps with Google Authorship, which rewards creation of original content with increased visibility in search rankings.
Google+ also asks for a work phone. Do not use your employer’s phone number, but rather your preferred contact number, probably your cell phone. The issue of supplying telephone numbers is a thorny one for women, who are more likely than men to be harassed by stalkers.
This is no one’s business unless you choose for it to be. No matter your age, supplying this information is likely to work against you at some point.
Your gender will probably be obvious from your name. Either way, it should be irrelevant to your professional activities and can only be used against you, if only by helping create a marketing profile.
Largely irrelevant unless it speaks to your cultural diversity or the geographic target location of your search. The first entry here should reflect where you live now. It’s a big plus in a global economy if you have lived overseas or read or speak a foreign language, so you might try something like: “Iran, fluent Farsi. Singapore, basic Mandarin.”
Personally oriented subject headings in your profile such as this one are Google+’s attempt to be both LinkedIn (professionally oriented) and Facebook (socially oriented) by giving you control of who sees what on your profile. Your relationship status is entirely personal, and I would advise against filling this in, unless you know it to be beneficial to your professional image.
If you have interests that support your professionalism, use them. For example, games such as chess speak to your analytical skills, while distance running, swimming, and riding speak to both health and your determination and resilience. Use verifiable professional achievements or skills related to professional achievement, such as “Top regional sales last three years out of five” or “Member of Mensa and appeared on Jeopardy!”
When your profile is complete, leave it for twenty-four hours and then come back and read it with fresh eyes. You will almost certainly make some tweaks. Once everything is just as you want it, check it against your resume and other social media profiles to ensure compatibility. Once this is done, you can enable “profile discovery,” which makes your profile public.
You’ll have the opportunity to create a Google+ URL address. To create this URL, Google+ asks for your name or nickname, then your current Google+ ID. Rather than using your name or nickname, which only your familiars know, try something that speaks to your profession, captures the essence of your professional brand, and hopefully adds to your discoverability, like KillerSystemsAnalyst or TopAccountant. If these are taken (and they probably are), try adding your area code or zip code—TopAccountant516 or TopAccountant31405—or your town—TopAccountantCharleston.
LinkedIn has established Groups that you can join, whereas Google+ has Communities you can join and Circles you can create and populate with whomever you want. You can create as many Circles as you wish, using your own criteria for defining who goes into which Circle. You can add both people you know and people you don’t know to your Circles.
Google+ gives you control of your profile and who gets to see what. You can drag and drop your contacts into the different Circles that you create, and thereby keep your employers and professional peers completely separate.
These contact Circles can be potential employers, contacts at target companies, or others who are helping you get a job. You can keep them in one group or separate them out and send them relevant updates on your current job search. Keeping high-value hiring titles separate is helpful in maintaining your professionalism and some control over what recruiters and potential hiring managers see about you.
Let’s say you’re an accountant looking to create a Circle for high-value contacts—those people with job titles that imply the authority to hire you or who hold titles that imply professional contact with those potential hiring authorities. All you need to do is a search within the Google+ site using “google.com google” followed by your choice of keywords. For example, an accountant might try searching:
• google.com google Accounting Manager
• google.com google Accounting Director
• google.com google Finance Director
• google.com google Controller
• google.com google VP of Finance
Repeating “google.com google” in your search term may seem strange, but it’s just the way to get the Google+ search engine to find what you want efficiently.
Once a search delivers results, you decide who to put in each particular Circle. For example, it would make sense to put all those contacts with titles one or more levels above your own into their own Circle so that you can customize your messages to be of interest to that Circle. Keeping employers away from professional colleagues is a good idea in a job search, because mingling the two could reveal to recruiters potential competitors for the job you want.
You can add contacts to your Circles without their authorization (unlike on LinkedIn) and/or a request that they “friend” you back (as on Facebook).
As you find the names that go with your targeted high-value job titles and add them to a Circle, you are getting that much closer to getting into conversations with the people in a position to hire you. So when you identify an especially interesting prospect, follow his posts and, as appropriate opportunities arise, comment on them, or repost with the person’s name and a flattering comment. Most people remember flattering comments, especially when reminded of them. Consequently, when you reach out to this person for direct communication, you can make reference to the post you liked and commented on as an icebreaker.
• Streams—On your homepage you’ll see your Home Stream. This tool collects and filters all the posts made by all the people in your different Circles. With the All filter selected, you can choose to see all these posts in either one long stream or by individual Circle. When you are engaged in a job search, reviewing the posts made by Circles that include recruiters and potential hiring managers should be a top priority, because these are the posts most likely to mention job openings and can give you the most mileage when you like or comment on them, potentially building bridges of connection with the very people who can most influence your professional future.
• Sparks—The Sparks function allows you to track posts, videos, and other information on topics of interest. This can contribute to your ongoing education and/or alert you to valuable information that you can subsequently share with your Circles, identifying you as a committed and engaged professional who contributes to the common good. You can also use it to gather insights into any company with whom you’ve landed an interview.
On your homepage you can find Sparks underneath Circles near the top of the page. Google+ has set up a number of Sparks categories from which you can choose.
• Posts—Making your posts public allows Google+ to index your expertise and supply it as a link in response to other people’s queries on this topic, which makes you and your knowledge discoverable by a much wider audience. Just be aware, though, that if you post something and it’s re-shared, your friends will be able to see the post even if the original was not shared with them. You can avoid this when you click the down arrow button in your post and choose “disable re-share.”
The future is here. Hangouts is Google+’s version of group video chat (like Skype), and allows you to join in conversations with people in your field. These video chats are currently limited to ten people; however, they can broadcast to an unlimited number, so I can see it being used as a platform for industry experts to share their expertise with much larger audiences. Look for Knock ’em Dead Hangouts coming soon!
Google is a financial powerhouse with every intention of dominating the social networking scene, so you can expect ongoing enhancements to the networking capabilities of Google+.
We have talked about LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. There are many more networking sites that could be useful for your job search. However, you should be careful to focus your energies on a handful of sites, rather than dilute the impact of your social networking activities with a minimal presence on too many.
Any successful professional networking strategy also leverages a handful of additional online and offline networks too, and these are what we will turn to next.