Get a Job Tweeple! Your Online CV Matters

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In a recent Jobvite Survey, 80% of employers confirmed that they included social media sites as part of their recruiting strategies.

83% will use social networks to recruit this year.

If an employer or potential client came looking for you, what would they find?

An excellent article in Canadian Business raised some things to think about:

1. You never know who’s looking. The article tells the story of an artist’s work being seen online by a producer who recommended the artist to PBS without telling her. The lesson: don’t assume that just because you are not receiving immediate first-hand feedback on your social media presence, that no one is looking. They are, and you must act as if they were.
2. LinkedIn rules. If you are a professional in the market for employment, or for contract work, LinkedIn is the place to start building your profile. 78% of employers and recruiters who use social media, use LinkedIn for recruiting. Facebook came next at 55%. LinkedIn is perfectly designed not only to feature your evolving CV, but to highlight your engagement with your professional or industry community. Get on LinkedIn, participate in professional and industry groups, and connect your professional Facebook and Twitter accounts to your LinkedIn profile.
3. Diarize. CV, or curriculum vitae, literally means ‘course of [my] life’. So unless you are dead, keep writing! Think of your online career brand as a living entity that is constantly evolving. Include your latest activities and accomplishments, and use evocative language to describe them. At that last event, did you “help out” or did you “organize, coordinate, spearhead, or develop…”?
4. Keep it clean. Here I disagree with the author of the CB article somewhat. She suggests that “it’s best to keep those pages neutral — like painting a house beige before putting it on the market…” The questionable design advice aside, this take sends the message that you should scrub your profiles of personality. Wrong. Certainly those party animal pictures from the holiday in Florida need to come down, and anything that is racist, sexist, or just plain illegal is a serious problem. But if you make yourself neutral, vanilla, or ‘all about the facts’, no one will notice you. Yes, you need to get those professional and academic strengths front and center, but they will only get you through the door. There are a thousand others with the same basic skills. It’s your personality, your engagement with your community, and your passions that will make you stand out. And if an employer or potential client really doesn’t like what they see there, isn’t it better to get that out of the way now?
5. Feed your network. This is the point that resonated with me the most: don’t network just to get the job or client, and then stop. If you do that, the next time you need your contacts, they will wonder where you have been and if you are just using them. I drive a similar point home with my business clients: social media is social! If you only promote, broadcast, and push, people will turn you off. Learn to listen, ask, support, comment, and engage. Assume a 2-way, rhetorical stance rather than a 1-way declarative stance (like I just did!).
6. Be present. In careers as in business, you have to spend time keeping your brand ‘front of mind’ in others. Decide what you are looking for, create your social media channels, and develop a disciplined structure of posting and interacting regularly. A pattern of frequent short posts and responses is more effective than long but infrequent articles. A few lines of intelligent response on a potential employer’s or client’s blog can have more impact than a 1000-word article.

Are you using social media to develop your CV? Are you an employer who uses social media as part of your recruiting? I would be interested to hear your thoughts and experiences.

I support small business and independent professionals in change and growth. If you are looking at a change or at taking your career to the next level, I can make a difference. Contact me, or check out my online coaching program Career Builder Bootcamp.

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