Job Search for Social Media: Ideas From the Trenches

Last week, I gave a talk to about 140 students at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, College of Engineering & Applied Science. I was asked to speak to the professional development seminar about some practical ways to use social media tools for the job search. Since I have had a few requests for my thoughts on the topic from people who saw my status update on LinkedIn, I decided to create this blog post.

Manage and Optimize Your Job Search Using Social Technologies

1. You should have a LinkedIn profile. Particularly of you're a technology professional, you should have one. It should be filled out fully because that's how hiring professionals find you--by searching for key words related to your experience. You should be connected to your friends. You should have endorsements and if you've got a blog its feed should be connected here (WordPress is particularly easy).

2. You should have a Slideshare account. Not only should Slideshare be used to upload white papers or presentations you've given, but also it should hold a copy of your resume in PDF or Microsoft Word format. Make it easy for someone to obtain your resume. If you're worried about getting spam in the form of phone calls or emails, you have remedies. Namely, a Google Voice number will allow you to screen callers and an email address dedicated to your job search can help defend your "good" address from would-be spammers.

3. Obtain a Google Voice account. It's free. Google Voice allows you to obtain a phone number in the area code of your choice. When someone calls that number, it rings all of the other numbers you provide for it. Yes, that's right. It rings your work phone, your home phone, and your mobile if you wish. It will even ring a temporary number if you're sitting at a desk that's not yours for the day. Even better, it sends you an email transcript of all voice messsages and can SMS messages to your phone. That part's still a little rough, but you can usually get a pretty good idea of what the call was about.

4. Expect that professional stalkers--recruiters if you prefer the term--will find you in unexpected places. Namely, they will look start looking for you more and more often on Facebook. Although this may cause you considerable discomfort, especially if you keep personal photos and have a crazy uncle who keeps writing embarrassing things on your wall, it's going to happen. While the majority of recruiters still do the majority of their talent hunting on LinkedIn, the number differential all but guarantees that we will see a migration of recruiters to Facebook. There is evidence that's already happening.

5. Save yourself the headache of browsing by setting up agents on Indeed and SimplyHired. These job aggregators scrape all of the job boards as well as niched professional sites and corporate career pages for job listings. These listings can be broken down geographically, by keyword, job title, and company name and delivered to your Inbox daily or weekly.

What tips do you have for just seekers to make the most of social technologies?