Has Twitter Reached Job Hunting Tool Status?
Today I watched another webinar, this time on ‘How to Use Twitter to Impress Recruiters’ by JT O’Donnell, founder of Careerealism.com. She provided five tips when using social media to find a job. They include:
Using Bio Keywords: This includes thinking about what key words people (recruiters) would use to find you and including them in your bio. She suggests looking at some relevant job postings, finding the prominent words and including them.
Feed Theme: She suggests focusing tweets around a particular theme that would give you expert status. This includes ensuring your 140 character tweets have impact as well as presenting yourself as an industry resource.
Using # Hashtags: While #followfriday was once a method for Tweeters to provide kudos to and suggestion of good people to follow, this has now been replaced by #hashtags. By including a relevant keyword preceded by a hashtag (e.g. #keyword), people can search for a certain topic, event, interest, profession etc. To find out what is being discussed, check out www.search.twitter.com.
Find & Follow: Finding recruiters and following them on Twitter will often prompt them to review your profile and possibly follow you back. You can then connect with them by sending them a direct message. This will cut through the clutter of the thousands of resumes they receive in their standard email inboxes. Using a service like Listorious or Twellow will allow you to search for people using keywords.
DM Networking: As referenced above, connecting with recruiters on Twitter helps you build a rapport, and is easy as you only need to read/reply in 140 character posts. Recruiters may be more likely to reply as a result.
Overall, JT O’Donnell talks about being proactive when job hunting and harnessing the power of social media to build your network. These principles are all very good and are great tips in general when building your contacts on social media. I agree with them, to some extent, however, I think the major flaw is possibly a lack of recruiters who are currently using the service for recruitment purposes. For the most part, it is the PR department who is managing a company’s Twitter feed, even within many recruitment agencies. There are some exceptions of course, including larger companies who may have an internal recruiter managing their HR feed. There are some very savvy professional recruiters using the site, but on the whole, I don’t think many of them have really embraced this form of recruiting. This also differs of course by area of specialization, with recruiters for marketing and IT likely more involved than those in accounting, operations or administration.
Job hunting is about maximizing your chances and opportunity. Building a social media profile can help keep you informed about trends within your profession, current events, industry experts and general topics of interest. When utilized properly, should also expand your network, opening up different possibilities and connecting you with other like-minded individuals. This may or may not result in new career opportunities, so it is important for job seekers to also keep their LinkedIn profile up-to-date, attend conferences and networking functions and utilize job boards to help aid their job search. By leveraging all resources available, you’ll advance your career more quickly and possibly make some valuable connections along the way.
We’d love to hear your perspectives on Twitter to Find a Job, both successes and challenges. Comment at our Facebook page or contact us on Twitter at @bcjobs.
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