How to?

As I said last week looking at new media technologies from the outside is a somewhat scary; where do you jump in and how do you even start to get yourself up to speed? It’s not like I didn’t know social media was an unparalleled networking tool, but I’ve been putting off signing on as my true self. I’m really concerned about privacy, (this is a middle aged person's hang-up apparently; teenagers and twenty-somethings barely give it a second thought.) I’ve come to realize I’m deluded about the number of people who will actually be looking at what I post. It will likely be only a few friends, family and classmates who have their arms twisted into reading my stuff. Nevertheless, what people see on the net could potentially be their first impression of me and when I’m looking for a job that impression has to be a good one. My goal is to present the best possible, most realistic vision of myself while maintaining some semblance of privacy and my uncertainty about exactly how to do that has prevented me from trying. Which media do I use? What should I put up? What is too much? How do I organize it all? The following proposals make good sense to me so far.

How to Use Social Media to Find a Job in 7 Not-Overwhelming Steps: 

• Clean up your profile on all the social media sites that you already use…no boozy photos of you at a party Saturday night  
• Work on your profile, your personal description…use lots of key words, searchable descriptors
• Twitter…follow and tweet to relevant recruiters and firms you’re interested in, you’ll hear immediately when they are looking for someone
• Subscribe to RSS feeds within your industry
• Get LinkedIn, cultivate connections and ask for recommendations
• Use facebook judiciously, it’s still mainly a personal networking site not necessarily a business one. Consider a facebook ad.
• Keep in mind, whatever you post is searchable and could potentially be seen by hundreds of people…including potential employers

(adapted from a report by social media consultant Dan Rutherford and recruiter Liam Morgan at Videojug and MDIA 1045 course work)

By now I’ve come to realize blogging and tweeting and linking-in are not brain surgery. Once you get started you discover there are lots of great resources to help along the way (for example, my all time favourite YouTube has a how-to-video for everything!) Yes, social media puts out a lot of information, but there are tools to help you sift through it, manage it and, if need be, delete it. I don’t have to know every little dot and dash to be social media literate I just have to be willing to watch carefully, dive in and, of course, know how to do a proper boolean search.

Stay tuned, next time I’ll talk about some of the useful connections I’ve made. Someone I didn’t know replied to one of my tweets with an intelligent comment, yeah!

Why now?

Being a full-time parent is the most rewarding, and most challenging, "job" I’ve ever had, bar none. Family is the centre of my life and that’s not going to change in the foreseeable future, but I also want to pick up the strands of my professional life, to do fulfilling work completely distinct from my husband and kids. So you don't think I'm too pie-in-the-sky I should admit the extra money would also be a boost to our admittedly tight budget.

I’ve been thinking I’d like to get back doing some paid work for awhile now, but hadn’t made any real moves to make it happen until this spring. My first concern was I needed a new resume, one that addressed the substantial gap in my employment history in a positive way. I think I have that now, but writing it was a long, drawn out process of restructuring and revision. I also did soul searching in terms of what I wanted my life to look like with work added in. This was a great process; how many times in our lives do we step back to examine our core values and carefully outline the ways in which we are going to try and honour those priorities? Not often enough I suspect.
 
I see myself working part-time for a couple of years before transitioning back into full time employment. Part-time positions are not advertised or posted in the same ways full-time jobs are. If I’m going to find something by word-of-mouth I’m really going to have to refine my network.

I now understand better how new media can play a key part in my thorough job search. It will help me refine my networking capabilities and then focus my actual search techniques. Of course, in a more broad sense, Social Media is taking on ever increasing importance in the fields of communications, public relations and marketing – exactly the industries I’m hoping to get back into. It’s essential I have a working knowledge of applications like facebook and twitter if I want to be a remotely appealing candidate for employers.

Social Media is such a huge hydra-headed entity it’s a bit intimidating. Me taking BCIT’s Media Communications: Intro to Social Networking course is about getting from thrashing around in the shallow end to comfortably swimming laps of front crawl. Before September I didn’t tweet, wasn’t LinkedIn and although I whiled away many happy hours on YouTube there was very little “me” about my use. I only watched videos never put up a video of my own or commented on anyone else’s (my favourites and playlists are quite nicely organized though I must say). I’ve been very resistant to getting a facebook account. Most of what I know of it comes from horror stories in the traditional media (well really their online versions; I’m not a complete Luddite.) I do resent not being able to access interesting fan pages though so I may cave in to the pressure and join using a nickname.

Next week: what happened when I began to wade in.