Social Networking for your Job Search

Posted by on October 5, 2009 · Leave a Comment 

By Roger Lear President OrlandoJobs.com

One of the buzz words on the internet today is social networks. Social Networks are groups of people who “gather” on the internet and contribute content in many ways. You have the opportunity to join a network of professionals (Linkedin.com, Spoke,com), photographers (Flickr.com), music (MySpace.com), college groups (facebook.com) or even soccer (Joga.com). Once at these sites (there are 1,000’s of networks), you can share all kinds of information about yourself, your interests and your thoughts. It is the members contributing on a regular basis that makes social networks popular.

So what does a social network have to do with your job search? Actually, it can play a big role in a couple of ways. First of all, a lot of the more popular social networking sites have job search capabilities for their members. Employers who post jobs on these sites can really “target” a demographic of the type of person they are looking to hire. For example, they may post summer jobs at MySpace.com and engineering positions at Linkedin.com. If you are a member of these sites, you will have access to these listings.

Today, employers are going directly to social networking sites in search of employees. This is recruiting on steroids! If they are looking for a customer service specialist in Lake Mary, they can easily search the profiles on any networking site and pull up candidates based on keywords, title or employer names you may have in your profile. From there, they have the ability to contact these individuals and see if they have any interest in working for their company. If you are in the middle of a job search, a well done profile on a targeted social network site could yield some great results for your career!

The downside of social networking when it comes to careers is that your profile may have too much information. Be careful of what a potential employer may see when they get to your profile. Do you still have your college pictures on your profile that would cause a potential employer to look elsewhere? Employers are also checking references by pulling up your MySpace.com page. I have done this and it sometimes is pretty scary! A couple months ago, a candidate we were considering for a position had the recipe for marijuana brownies on their MySpace page. Be careful out there!

Filed under Human Resources