I’ve been a recruiter, professionally, for 9 years and I’ve recruited everything from Creative Directors to Designers to Information Technology peeps to Finance people. One of the hottest trends in recruiting is the ability to announce job openings on social media sites. The biggest example is Google. Google’s HR recruitment campaign on YouTube went viral in a less than a week. Companies all across the world are beginning to create profiles on MySpace, Facebook and upload videos to YouTube.

So enough about us HR folk. What I want to discuss is how YOU can find a job by using social media.

The hottest social media site, in my opinion, on the ‘net is Twitter. So how can you use Twitter to find a new job? Easily.

If you think of Twitter as the “center of the ‘net” or as the “watercooler of the net,” (these comments coined by Geekbrief’s @calilewis) then you’ll soon realize the potential of Twitter. It’s easy. It’s quick. It’s instantaneous. You can read 40 people’s “what are you doings” in less than a minute, thanks to Twitter’s 140 character response field. If recruiters spend, on average, less than a minute to brief over a resume then recruiters should love Twitter. And we do.

So if more people are beginning to use Twitter, what better avenue to market yourself and your resume! As a recruiter, my team has begun the social media route in finding the top, best talent. The Monster.com’s of the world are, in all honesty, over-populated with resumes. If I’m looking for a designer who has a love for the web and who knows the latest and greatest in advertising as well as social media, would I find that person more quickly on Monster or on a social medium, such as Twitter or Facebook? To me, it makes perfect sense to use social media sites to attract top-notch talent.

We’ve begun advertising our job openings on Twitter, Pownce, Facebook and MySpace because we know that the talent we’re looking for are going to be more involved in these sites rather than they would be on the regular job boards. All you need is your resume and portfolio online and then you can just broadcast your website on Twitter or follow someone you know who is a recruiter (example: www.twitter.com/imc2recruiter).

Most HR departments these days have created their own MySpace and Facebook profiles. They’re there to not only give more presence to their company but to also “add friends” (aka add potential candidates) to their network.

Should you not upload your resume to the job boards? No, I think you should. But you definitely should think outside the box and begin to use social media sites as well to network. Network, network, network.

Watch the video below to see how companies and recruiters are using social media to find YOU.

http://www.vimeo.com/948866

Tags: Career Topics, Job, networking, Portfolio, Resume, Social Media, twitter

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 27th, 2008 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Career Topics, Space, Tech/Gadgets/Computers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.