Social Media Talk at DePaul University

This week, I have been invited to give a talk to students in the Information Technology programs at DePaul University's Loop campus. I'll be talking about leveraging Social Media in the job search.

I thought I'd take a reverse engineering approach. As a recruiter, I try a lot of different sorts of new tools and online media to see if they will yield some results for candidates. So I started thinking about how I'd position myself to be found by recruiters and other hiring managers were I to be in the position of conducting a hunt as a soon-to-be or recent graduate. I was forced to make some assumptions about what your average undergrad IT student knows about basic networking skills.

In short, I think that most of the students out there are pretty darned savvy about the tools and techniques surrounding social networking online. But when it comes to leveraging them for a job search... cleaning up your online profiles, positioning yourself effectively, making the most of every real-life meeting and locking in that relationship by using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter efficiently... that's where I'll be focusing my talking points. LinkedIn is a critical one, of course, and one which, when I've given talks on social networks to university students in the past, I've found is underutilized. However, given its continuous growth, I expect to be pleasantly surprised when I ask how many have filled out a profile there this time around.

But I'm hoping just as much that by getting in front of a group of current IT students and recent grads that I'll learn just as much from them, maybe more. It's definitely getting easier to find and track social relationships online, but it's also just as easy to get lost in all of the noise. Learning to tune in on what's relevant to the job hunt is the key.