Social media is increasingly key to getting a job. Getting hired isn’t always as simple as writing a resume these days. Finding the most attractive positions and working your professional connections are also essential. That’s where your social profiles come into play. Before starting to hunt for a new job, it’s a good idea to have an idea of how you can use social tools to get hired faster. Below you’ll find 5 key ways you can get the most out of your social presence online to speed up the process and find the ideal openings.
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Choose your platform
Most people will try and find a position using LinkedIn. In many cases that’ll be enough, although it doesn’t quite use the full potential of social media when job hunting.
Finding jobs, influencers, and connecting with the right people can and should also be done using other social hubs if you want to get the maximum reach possible.
There are plenty of unlikely but useful options to choose from such as:
Facebook
Reddit
Twitter
TikTok
Instagram
YouTube
Depending on your profession, you can leverage the huge user bases of these platforms for tips, connections, and even job offers.
In some cases like Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, this can involve social groups that share events, job openings, and other advice.
Alternatively, places like YouTube, Instagram, and even TikTok can be great for finding out current job trends. These platforms are the best for getting professional advice and learning about companies hiring from influencers in your industry.
Of course, which networks you use always depend on your personal circumstances. Let’s look at how that might work below.
Find your professional community
The next most important step in using social media for getting hired is to track down the best connections. This means finding your professional community.
Focus at first on using keywords to find the social groups or well-known names and brands in your industry. By connecting with these people and companies you’ll start getting suggestions and recommendations for other useful people in your industry.
This is where the algorithms used by social platforms can make life that little bit simpler as you move forward. With this help, you’ll quickly be able to find and join specific groups for people in your sector and career niche. This in turn will help you find the most exciting opportunities that might fly under the radar.
Clean up your profiles
Whether you use social media to get hired or not, you should make sure your profile(s) look professional.
Ideally, you should remove anything you wouldn’t want a prospective employer to see such as photos of drunken partying or similar.
At the very least it’s sensible to adjust the privacy settings on your profile so that nothing unprofessional will appear in a Google search or if an employer looks you up.
Of courses, you don’t have to hide all evidence of your personality online. Employers only check social networks to get a better idea of who you are as a candidate. It’s perfectly ok to have a non-professional life on social media after all.
Lastly, you should also make sure your information is consistent in the places where you want to be found. A little housekeeping might be in order to achieve this but this will be important so that there’s no confusion over your skillset or experience.
Engage
Engagement is a big part of social networking in general and it is definitely a cornerstone to job searching using these platforms.
It’s important to make yourself known to the right people during a job search, whether it be employers or people in the professional community. This might mean joining in with online discussions, sharing ideas and posts, or just DMing a prospective employer.
However you do it, make sure it makes a positive impression and helps you gain a good reputation in these communities.
In addition, it’s crucial to let your connections know that you are hunting for jobs. This will help the right recommendations come your way, especially if you’ve already done the legwork in the points listed above.
Social media has been a real boost for job hunters over the last 10 years. It’s made reaching out to influential people and getting the inside scoop on trends far easier than ever.
Using the tips above, you can refine your search and the image you present when you make those essential connections.
Tarun Pandit: Tarun Pandit an entrepreneur and blogger by passion, created Tech Khiladi to help with people with Technical stuff.