social media Archives - Palladian Career Resources

There is a lot written about how networking online can propel your job search. Claims are made that social media can deliver a better job much faster than other job search techniques. Despite this, many job seekers are not using social media and online networking sites.

In a survey of job seekers conducted in Australia, less of than 20% of the job seekers thought social networking sites help a job search. Although this study was conducted in Australia, I expect the results would be very similar around the world.

There are a number of reasons job seekers don’t see value in social networking. The two biggest are related to not understanding how to use this tool. First, even though the growth of social media sites has been tremendous, everyone isn’t on Facebook or Twitter. If you haven’t used a tool, it would be difficult to see the value. Second, many job seekers adopt the wrong approach to social media, leading to poor results.

The solution is simple, give social media a try and adopt a strategy that will work. Ok, that’s easy to say, but how do you do it?

Imagine social media sites as being a huge sidewalk in the business district of your city. There are an overwhelming number of people walking by. Some can help you with your job search, most can’t. There are two approaches people new to social media try. They either hold a sign and hope people will read it, even though there are millions of other people standing there with signs too, or they randomly walk up to people and ask for a job. How effective would your job search be if you went to busy street corner and tried this?

The key to social media is building relationships. The 80% of job seekers who think social media will not help are right if you expect to be able to go to a networking site, ask people you don't know for a job online and get results. Use social media to identify people you know that can help you. Connect with friends, family, former coworkers and others you know online. As you identify opportunities that interest you, ask your network what they know about the company. It is likely someone you know will know someone that works for the company. That individual can give valuable insight into the hiring process and priorities of the company.

Gathering this research is the biggest benefit of social media. You can tailor your approach to the company to their goals and values, and improve your odds of getting hired.

I received the CareerBuilder Hiring Forecast for 2009 along with a few other reports from CareerBuilder recently. There are a number of interesting items in the reports, and two in particular that jumped out to me.

Changes in Staffing Levels

The hiring forecast compiled data from 3,200 hiring managers. Interestingly, most said they were increasing or maintaining staffing levels. Only 16% said that they planned to reduce the number of permanent full-time employees in their location.

This may come as a shock to a lot people. The only news you can find talks about how bad the economy is. The economy is bad. We’re in a recession. January’s unemployment figure is due out today, and I expect it to be bad.

So, how can the CareerBuilder figure be right? As bad as the economy is, it is still running. We have unemployment around 7%… that means 93% of the workforce is employed. Companies also moved aggressively to layoff workers at the end of 2008 to position themselves for ’09. Many facilities are now staffed to ride out the downturn.

Additionally, many hiring managers understand that the average recession lasts about a year, and we haven’t had a recession lasting more than two years since the great
depression. We’re already a year into this, so the hope is that by 2010, we’ll be on the path to recovery. There is no guarantee that this will happen, in the 1800’s, we had two recessions last more than five years without an upturn. Our situation is bad, but doesn’t compare to the situation at those times. One of the prolonged recessions occurred after the War of 1812, when Washington DC was burned by the British, and the other occurred in the early 1870’s with the county still trying to recover from the Civil War.
Fortunately, our country is in much better shape than at either of those times.

We don’t know when the economy will start growing again. We don’t know which companies are going to hire and which will layoff. We can’t be sure of much right now, and the negativity in the news can be overwhelming.

If you need a job, the only option is to forget the stats and headlines. Aggressively work to find your next job. Maintain your self-confidence. There will be job seekers that desperately need a job but lose momentum in their search expecting failure with each application.

No matter how bad the economy becomes, there will be millions of people that find jobs in 2009. To be one of them, you need to be positive, confident and proactive. Attitude and effort will make a huge difference in your search.

Social Media

Employers are using social media sites to assess job seekers. A social media site is a website with a community of users that interact. MySpace and Facebook are the two biggest, but there are a lot more out there. Of the managers that checked social media for a candidate, one-third found a significant reason to reject the candidate based on what they found.

Some of the common problems that were identified included drug and alcohol use, inappropriate conduct, a bad attitude towards past employers, poor communications skills and lies about the candidate’s qualifications. If you have online public profiles, you need to maintain a basic level of decency.

You should also google your name to check what information is on the web about you. It is so easy to do a search on a candidate’s name, it will become a common screening procedure at many companies. You should at least know what they are going to find.

More information can be found in the the 2009 CareerBuilder Hiring Forecast the CareerBuilder Report on Social Media.