Social Networking Tools

I have to admit I personally have a mixed relationship with these tools.  I am a blogger, have an active presence on Linkedin, at least a minimum presence on Facebook and have had a twitter account for a few years, but haven’t created my own web page, and while I set up a twitter account 3 years ago, I doubt that I’ve posted a dozen tweets.  My Facebook is family facing, not business.  Well, you get the idea I think.  One of the participants in NFJS is a Social Media Coach/Mentor (Cheryl Richmond) and just an incredible resource and talent.  She is starting to get me focused on this and provided some basic guidelines that make a lot of sense.

Let’s start with an inventory:

●      Linkedin – Must have for a job seeker, this is the key location for defining your “Brand”.  It is a hub for business contacts and activities built around that brand.

●      Facebook – Might be very important for a job seeker about half a step down from Linkedin.  Primarily set up to connect people with each other on a personal level.  With that in mind, it still needs to reflect your brand.  Can be a huge time suck and there are privacy and security issues.

●      Twitter – Optional.  It is an “in-real-time” communications tool that can extend your network while making it much more responsive.  It can also be an amazing time suck.

●      Blog – Optional.  Works great if you have ideas that are relevant to your brand, but can kill you if you drift.

●      Biznik – Useful if you are an independent contractor looking at getting some level of b2b stuff going.

●       “MyPersonalDomain”  Whatever you choose this to be, from a web page to a blog to some kind of store.

●      Geolocation sites like Foursquare or Gowalla:  These provide physical location information with the goal of connecting people in a location.  There are specific situations where these can be useful, but they come with additional cautions

●      Etc.  – there are a huge number of other tools that fall under this category from MySpace to Picasa to Yelp to Meetup.    Any one of these can provide value and that value will vary on an almost infinite array of things.  The challenge with some of these (think MySpace) is that you create a permanent presence with them whether you intend it or not.  That Frat Party you went to in the 90s and that you friends posted on MySpace?  It’s still out there.

I’m sure I’m missing a ton of stuff, but even if I knew what they all were, as of May 2011, this is a great list to start with.

 

There are also some principles that need to be implemented across your internet profile:

●      As much as possible, create one consistent brand.  So use the same picture for every profile you own, represent yourself as the same person with the same skills in every profile.

●      Be prudent.  If you are looking for a job as the Pastor of a church, work as hard as you can to eliminate the pictures of you at the Atheist Convention.

●      Be safe, or at least try.  Control your permissions on all of these tools, organize your contacts/friends into relevant groups.  The Rugby Team and the Rose Garden Club will probably not understand each other or how you could belong to both, so keep them separate.

●      Set up your public profile to reinforce itself from every window.  If you claim to be a “Team Builder” in Linkedin, then your Facebook should feature people beyond yourself.

In very general terms each has a primary purpose (in the context of job search), so what are they?

●      Linkedin is central.  Define your brand here, get a good picture that you recognize, fill out a complete profile.  Focus of your contacts is business connections, but the line is not rigid.

●      Facebook, this is almost as important, but the focus is more towards family and friends.  Use the same picture as Linkedin and consider your brand as you build out your network and fill out your profile.  Be respectful of your contacts when playing the various games.  Don’t spam; accidentally or on purpose!

●      Twitter, use the same consideration when creating your profile, but then remember that this is a real time communication tool.  While Linkedin and Facebook are fundamentally static, there is nothing static about Twitter.  This provides extraordinary resources for researching companies, opportunities and people in real time. 

A key to understanding these resources is understanding that we really have only one network, and while we categorize it for a variety of reasons and in a variety of ways, there is far more overlap than separation, so we need to treat it with that in mind.  The tools we have today for the organizing our network and mining information about it are truly amazing.  So far beyond what we’ve ever had, but the central fact remains that “Network” is still just a fancy word describing our circle of friends. 

By the way, Consumer Reports published a terrific article on how to effectively stay safe in their June 2011 issue.  It should be read by pretty much everyone that spends time online.

Stories from NFJS

My desperate hunting for blog ideas has been solved!


I mentioned that I joined a “support group for reluctant bloggers” in an earlier blog and this week I was able to get to there for the second time. While participating, I had an epiphany as another member talked about the stories of her clients and their success, I realized that I haven't written a single story about the participants from NFJS and what's happened to them. Once that penetrated my thick skull, the hard part is choosing. While I’ve been doing Notes from the Job Search for a little more than a year and a half, the principles I use evolved over 30 years, so the stories end up going back a long time.

Here’s a story about a young soldier reentering the civilian world

Somewhere along the line I learned the value of separating the activity a candidate does from the product they work on. About 3 years ago a young friend of mine sent me an email asking for help. This young man (I’ll call him “Jim”) went to college majoring in Computer Science on an ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corp) scholarship, graduating in 2002. Well surprise, surprise, he was immediately activated and spent the next four years on active duty with the last two being in Iraq as a transportation officer. He mustered out in 2006, took a year off and had been looking for work for six months prior to reaching out to me. In those months, he had received nothing more than an automated response while submitting more than 100 resumes for various jobs in the IT industry. His goal company was Microsoft and he hadn’t even gotten an automated response from them.

I asked him to send me a copy of his resume and upon reading it understood the problem immediately. His resume was completely built around his experience in Iraq and he was applying for jobs as a project manager in IT.

We got on the phone together and I had him describe what he was responsible for. As he was doing this I kept asking him to avoid talking about trucks or transportation and spend more time focusing on his personal responsibilities. So when he said something like, “I had to get trucks filled with medical supplies from town A to town B on a weekly basis while making sure that we had supplies coming in from the States that would allow us to meet our schedules.” I helped him transform that into “developed schedules for multiple teams, coordinating multiple interdependent projects to deliver requirements on time and on budget.” Which is in fact a description of what he did, minus the references to Iraq and the Army and trucks. It is also describing his behavior in IT terms rather than Army terms.

One of the many great things Jim brought to this was an openness and ability to learn very quickly so the time necessary for him to completely re-write his resume was less than a week. When he submitted this new resume he started getting personal responses within the first week, interviews within a month and he received a Microsoft offer (that he took) within 3 months.

The principle Jim implemented was simply describing his experience in terms of what he personally did, not what he did it on, using terms his target audience understood. He did not drive or load trucks, he did plan, develop “critical path analysis”, and coordinate multiple interdependent projects. When put in terms that automated systems expect and that IT recruiters understand, the quality of his experience became obvious, as did Jim’s desirability as an employee. It also helped him understand how to communicate his experience during interviews in terms understood by the people interviewing him.

Most important, it got him the job!