Online Posts Affect Offline Career Opportunities
Recent surveys indicate that roughly half of all employers research job candidates online via search engines and social networking sites. LinkedIn, one of the most prominent social networking sites for professionals, claims that the staffing departments of over 350 major companies and numerous top-tier recruiting firms research candidates through its site.
Some recruiters are now looking at candidates’ personal social pages to uncover the personalities and behaviors of potential hires. Revealing photos and stories about one’s drunken adventures that appear online are definitely playing a role in decisions about who will get the job.
Your personal identity is your professional identity in Web 2.0. If you choose to develop a personal profile that you don’t want prospective employers to see, then create pages that only your friends and family can access by adding passwords to your pages. There are services that will help you add password protection to a personal site for free.
As a contract trainer, it is essential for you to effectively leverage the growing power of social networking to build your personal brand and to attract demand for your services. This includes professional profiles on sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn, as well as postings to blogs and videos on YouTube. Here’s how to get started:
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Establish goals and objectives. Decide what you want to accomplish and what image you want to project. Then keep these goals in the forefront as you are composing your online profile, posting videos and contributing to blogs.
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Develop a plan. Choose the social networking tools and the online communities that will help you meet your goals and establish a timetable for becoming an active member.
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Introduce yourself in a way that’s appropriate to the situation. Social networks are a great way to showcase your expertise, values, and varied interests but a recitation of your resume isn’t what social networking is all about. Establish your credibility by describing your experience and abilities as you would to someone you just met in a face-to-face encounter.
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