Social media is not just for keeping up with your college friends as they start their families and find jobs in new cities. Social media can also help you find a job, if you’re using it the right way. Do you know how many companies are using social media to recruit and vet their new candidates? Studies recently have shown that 92% of companies are using social media in some way during the hiring process. Here are 7 things that successful job seekers are doing on social media.
Keep it clean
We can’t say this enough. Keep your profile free of any incriminating photos. And if you’re someone that will update multiple platforms each day, you’ve got a project ahead of you. Make sure you go back through the archives and delete anything you wouldn’t want your new boss to see. Or better yet, if your grandmother would think differently about you after viewing a photo or a comment you’ve made, take that off your profile.
Fill out your LinkedIn profile completely
This doesn’t mean you have to talk about your biggest accomplishment from pre-school, but it does mean that you should take the time to fill out the sections about your volunteer experience, give detail the languages you speak, and accurately describe the jobs you’ve held. A single line that gives generic information about a previous position along with the dates you held it barely counts as “filling out” your profile. Invest some time here so that someone looking at your profile gets interested in your background and doesn’t need you to send them your resume to understand where you’ve been in your career.
Pick your favorite platforms
Don’t have a profile on every site available. Pick your favorites and keep your profile and connections up to date.
Use your real name
Mr. Froggy Frog is not a professional username. Even if your real name is already taken on Twitter, come up with some derivation of your given name that doesn’t make you sound like a cartoon character.
Choose your comments carefully
Because you did all the work of scrubbing your previous posts to make sure you don’t have anything out there that you wouldn’t want your next boss to see, make sure that the posts you like and topics you discuss won’t have to be things that you scrub in your next social media check up.
Contact your connections
If you’ve been on LinkedIn for awhile and have a pretty solid network, check in on your connections. See if anyone you know is currently working at a company you have applied at, or are curious about. Most people are more than willing to help someone who’s trying to find their next opportunity. -Just be sure if you’re sending them a direct message that it says something more than “hi,” and ask for specific help. Saying something like, “I’m looking for a job and wonder if you can help me” is not specific enough. If you want them to introduce you to someone in their network, or see that they worked at a company you’ve applied to, explain those things and ask if they’d be willing to assist you.
Follow up
When you make contact with someone on social media, and you take the conversation offline to texting or emailing, make sure that you actually follow through with where your conversation takes you. There’s nothing worse than connecting on social media, promising to follow through with something after an initial conversation, and dropping the ball. When you’re leading a professional conversation, even if it’s on Facebook, you can’t afford not to follow through with what you say you’re going to do. -It gives people the impression that you’re not reliable or will only do something when it benefits you.
Social media is just one factor in your job search, but one that needs to be curated and thought about when you start applying to jobs. Be 100 percent sure you know what your social media accounts are saying about you before you send your resume to a company that’s hiring. You can nearly guarantee that they’ll look at your social media profiles to get to know you before the interview. Afterall, didn’t you do your research about them online before you applied to their open position?