How Can You Make Impact to Your Job Search via Social Media

Shares 248

We hear every day that social media has penetrated every part of our life, and is around us, everywhere, all the time. We are also told that social media also plays an important role in your job search. Some people are able to find jobs through the social media; some people’s job search gets influenced by the company’s presence and value on the social media, while for some companies their hiring decisions get influenced by social media.

Be there, It’s Important!

Not all of us tend to take these tit-bits about the importance of social media seriously. Some job seekers are extremely active on the social media like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Google+, etc. Some are moderately active, logging and showing some activity once or twice a week, or may be a couple of times a month. Some of us are indifferent to social media, and choose to assume it doesn’t exist and refrain from even being seen virtually altogether.

The fact of the matter is social media is an important influencing factor in your job search. So, be there, and don’t just be there, be active there.

What Comes In

Have you gone mountaineering and scaled a peek? Or have you gone trekking and camping? Or maybe you have done bungee-jumping? Or maybe you are not adventurous but you are a creative person and love writing poetry or making sketches and paintings? Any of these notable achievements and activities, must, and we say ABSOLUTELY MUST go up on the social media. All the really good and kind things you have done in life, should be highlighted on the social media. Post pictures and content accordingly. Anybody looking at your social profile must feel those positive vibes.

What Goes Out

Those pictures of your drinking bouts with your friends and those bachelor parties and those tweets and re-tweets that were sexual in nature or were anti-government full of swearing and depression and rage, all of that needs to be taken down. You don’t want to showcase yourself as irresponsible, reckless. You don’t want to project yourself as a liability. All such negative content, that otherwise may look cool to you, would tell your employers frisking through your profiles that you are not quite suitable to be employed by them, it scares them that your social image might make you a liability for the company, which is not something they want. So you might want to re-consider before you post that empty crate of bottles that your whole gang drained out, or before posting that comment on JLo’s picture.

What do Employers do on Your Social Profile

Employers use the social media as one of the tools to screen through the applicants they have on the job posting. They evaluate your character and your personality by checking your profiles. They want to know if you carry yourself professionally or not. They want to know if you would fit in and gel well with the company’s values, the company’s culture and the habits. If you keep posting that you are late for a date and you are late for your class, you are late for your work and you are late in reaching home, you can forget getting hired anytime soon. Who wants an employee who is not punctual with anything? In short, employers are looking for reasons that would help them decide that they should not hire you. Poor communication skills, discriminatory comments, drinking, drug abuse, inconsistent qualification and information across profiles, have all been reasons for potential candidates to be rejected for a job by the employers.

Useful Social Media Tricks That Will Help

Why don’t you ask your friends and colleagues to write you some great testimonials and put in a word or two of how awesome you work. Some great comments of nice a colleague you were and how much you are going to be missed with the farewell pictures from your previous office would be such a big help. Point out somebody looking for a help towards an article that might guide that person. Share meaningful content. Avoid typos completely, anywhere and everywhere on your profile and in all your posts. Avoid using the short-hands like ‘u’ for ‘you’ and ‘2’ for ‘to’. And avoid too much of ‘lol’ and ‘rofl’. Often when you log into other websites using your social media logins like that of Facebook and Twitter, whatever activity you do on those websites gets automatically posted on the site using whose login credentials you logged in. Beware of that, you might not always want that to happen, especially because it is completely out of your control and you may not even realized that it got shared. Some employers may even ask for your passwords to your social media sites. This practice has been declared illegal in some states (California, Maryland, Delaware, Oregon, Washington and Illinois).

So, you might have to give away your password, and then you can change it once the potential employers are done with their investigations. Or you can refuse, after all, it’s a choice you make, and you can’t be sure whether that would make you ineligible for the job.

Social media is important, not to just to express yourself, but also in your job hunt. And if you mind what you post and share and let others share, you could use this in your favour and portray yourself as the perfect candidate that your potential employers had been waiting for all their lives, or you can mess it up and destroy whatever chances you may have.

Image Courtesy: mkhmarketingkhmarketing