How to Use Social Media to Land a Great Job

If you, like nearly 40% of job seekers in the United States, don’t update your resume at all, you must be familiar with its modern equivalent: social media. According to research by recruitment firm HiringSolved, only a quarter of job seekers Update their resume More than once a year, if at all. However, this is not indicative of laziness in the world of work, but rather of what employment has evolved into.

“Gone are the days when you would frantically update your resume and apply to job after job,” HiringSolved CEO Sean Burton told Business News Daily. “Today’s top candidates are much more passive. They are willing to wait for the right job to land in their lap and almost expect recruiters and hiring managers to contact them. In 2014, we expect more companies to abandon traditional resumes in favor of new and innovative recruiting methods. Traditional ones better reveal a candidate’s true talents and long-term employment preference.

The publication asserts that companies are increasingly searching for candidates based on social media profiles, or searching for those they find in traditional resume databases through social media searches.

“Using a social media profile as a resume will be the new normal for employment in 2014,” Burton told Business News Daily. “Social media profiles often contain more accurate and up-to-date information about a person’s experience, providing a more complete picture than a resume alone.”

To see what hiring looks like in 2014, job seekers need to know how to create a professional and attractive social media profile that will catch the attention of recruiters and look good to hiring managers doing social media research. Here’s how:

1. Watch Google

Googling yourself frequently isn’t indulging your ego, it’s good business. Make sure, if your name is popular, that you are already at the top of the search results. There are many guides available for precisely this purpose, and online professional activism can help in itself. You should be able to find yourself on Google using your name and location, if not your name alone. Hiring managers don’t want to see that someone is invisible online, they want a fresh look at who the job seeker is outside of their resume.

If what appears first on Google is something you don’t want potential employers to see, see if you can remove it yourself. Oftentimes, it’s easy to remove a misleading MySpace profile from high school.

2. Be professional on social media

If you don’t update your social media profiles, you are doing yourself a disservice. Make sure you have up-to-date contact information, such as a reliable email, as well as job and work experience information. Research conducted by HiringSolved showed that 71 percent of respondents with social media accounts did not include professional information in their profiles. A quick summary of where you’ve worked and what you do is relevant for all social media platforms, not just LinkedIn. Some platforms provide fields for this, while for others a few words of well-placed description will do the trick.

3. The network is online

When the hiring manager is looking for your footprint online, he or she will be impressed if you are a valuable participant in the industry discussion. It’s often a good idea to join a forum for people in your field, and contribute as much as you can. This shows that you have a passion for your work that goes beyond your schedule – as long as you’re not posting on company time. Being part of professional groups can also lead to offers from particularly aggressive recruiters looking for people with a specific skill set for a challenging position.