Starting Points: LinkedIn

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Jul 4, 2010

Ways to Use Social Networking to Land Your Next Job

By Stacy Rapacon
Sunday, July 4, 2010; G03

When looking for my first full-time job about six years ago, I didn't really consider tapping my personal networks online. Friendster and MySpace -- the big names in social media at the time -- were just vehicles for sharing pictures and finding out what old friends were up to (without having to actually talk to them). And that newfangled thing called Facebook, which still required a college e-mail account to join, just seemed redundant.

Today you're falling woefully behind in the race for open jobs if you're not plugged into social-networking sites. Facebook, for example, has exploded with more than 400 million active users, each of whom averages 130 friends. That's a whole lot of people who could help with your job hunt. LinkedIn, with more than 70 million members, offers a more professional networking platform for you to post your résumé and connect with former and current co-workers. And many other sites, including Twitter, can also help you find employment. Wherever you surf, here are tips on how you can work the social-networking scene to land your next (or first) job:

Build your professional brand. Just as you would with a traditional résumé and cover letter, you should create an online presence that represents you best. If you're active on Facebook or other sites for personal use, consider creating separate accounts specifically for your professional efforts.

Make sure all your profiles are complete, highlighting your skills and filled with keywords and phrases that recruiters might search for. Andrea Sittig-Rolf, author of "Revolutionize, Revitalize & Rev Your Résumé," recommends including a mission statement of five words: "I help companies . . . "

You should also start a blog or Twitter account that can establish you as an expert in the field you'd like to pursue. "A blog will enable you to become more visible in search engines, such as Google, which hiring managers use to screen a lot of candidates," says Ivan Misner, author of "Networking Like a Pro" and founder of networking company BNI.com.

Part of building and maintaining a brand is monitoring what others have to say about you. Watch out for anything about you (or someone with a similar name) floating around cyberspace that might put you in a bad light -- which could be anything from photos of you drunk to bad language or even excessively poor spelling. Google yourself regularly, and delve deeper into your online presence with sites such as Pipl.com and Spokeo.com.

Keep in touch. Social-networking sites have made it easier than ever to maintain relationships with distant relatives, old classmates, former co-workers -- just about anyone you've ever met (who's also plugged in). Facebook suggests people you may know through your existing contacts, and LinkedIn shows you first-, second- and third-degree connections.

Advertise your professional intentions. Misner suggests letting your networks know the top five companies you'd like to work for. Send out tweets and status updates asking, for example: "I'd really love to work for Kiplinger. Can anyone put me in touch with someone there?"

"That laser specificity is counterintuitive, but it's very powerful," he said. When you're explicit, people are more likely to remember connections they might have and offer them to you. Also, ask for an introduction, not just contact information.

Research prospective employers. Use your social-media savvy to dig up all you can about any companies and jobs that interest you. Check out a company's Web site and Google the heck out of it, but also search social-networking sites for company pages, as well as employees. Or follow them on Twitter; some companies even offer feeds specifically for job postings, including AT&T (@attjobs), MTV (@mtvnetworksjobs) and Thomson Reuters (@TRCareers). You can also check on career sites, such as Vault.com -- where you can find loads of information on companies for free, plus additional details for $10 a month.

Showcase your tech savvy. Ours is the first full generation raised on computers. Social-networking skills and knowledge that feel natural to us (no, Mom, you don't say the Facebook) can be a great advantage, especially in workplaces looking to enhance their online exposure. Be sure to include your social-networking expertise on your résumé.

Now that you've plumbed the Internet for opportunities to jump-start your career, remember that your online persona can only get you so far. You have to continue your job search with in-person meetings.

-- Kiplinger's Personal Finance

Aug 30, 2009

Facebook's Religion Question Prompts Soul-Searching - washingtonpost.com

Image by frankdasilva via Flickr

By William Wan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 30, 2009

For the longest time, the question just sat there on his screen. Cursor blinking. Waiting quietly, like a patient priest in a confessor's box. Religious Views: _____.

Creating a Facebook profile for the first time, Eric Heim hadn't expected something so serious. Hunched over his laptop, he had whipped through the social network Web site's questionnaire about his interests, favorite movies and relationship status, typing witty replies wherever possible. But when he reached the little blank box asking for his core beliefs, it stopped him short.

"It's Facebook. The whole point is to keep it light and playful, you know?" said Heim, 27, a college student from Dumfries. "But a question like that kind of makes you think."

Such public proclamations of beliefs used to require a baptism in water, or a circumcision, or learning the five pillars of Islam. Now Facebook users announce their spiritual identity with the stroke of a few keys. And what they are typing into the open-ended box offers a revealing peek into modern faith and what happens to that faith as it migrates online.

Of its 250 million users worldwide, Facebook says more than 150 million people choose to write something in the religious views box.

Amid the endless trivialities of social networking sites -- the quotes from Monty Python, the Stephen Colbert for Prez groups, the goofy-but-calculatingly-attractive profile pics -- the tiny box has become a surprisingly meaningful pit stop for philosophical inquiry.

Millions have plumbed their innermost thoughts, struggling to sum up their beliefs in roughly 10 words or less. For many, it has led to age-old questions about purpose, the existence of the divine and the meaning of life itself.

Some emerge from the experience with serious answers. George Mason University student Travis Hammill, 19, spent several days distilling his beliefs into this sentence: "Love God, Love Others, Change the World."

Others try to deflect the question with humor.

"God knows," wrote Hannah Green, 19, who attended Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville. "Pastafarian," typed Maddy Gillis, 20, of Kensington, invoking a popular pseudo-religion that venerates a "Flying Spaghetti Monster."

A good many, however, tread the fine line between wit and truth: "Agnostic, but accepting offers." "I barely believe I exist."

For Heim, who joined Facebook last year, the box posed a question with no easy answer.

With space limited to 100 characters, there was simply no room for Heim to go into his childhood experiences with faith -- growing up with an agnostic father, an evangelical mother and a fundamentalist grandmother. There was no space to describe the terror he felt after learning of heaven and hell. Or how the hell part weighed especially heavily after he was caught breaking into a neighbor's home at age 7.

He couldn't convey the profound faith and forgiveness he found in junior high after hearing the tear-filled sermons of a charismatic Baptist minister. Or the eventual dulling of that faith in college by alcohol. And he couldn't fully explain the slow reformation of that faith, now that he has abandoned the hollowness of his old party life.

"How the heck do you fit all of that into a box?" asked Heim, who sometimes attends a Lutheran church in Dale City.

So rather than type in a specific denomination or a pithy, amusing answer, Heim entered this non-sequitur: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

It is a phrase written by linguistic philosopher Noam Chomsky to demonstrate how a sentence can be grammatically logical and yet have no meaning -- how things that seem so right at first can crumble under scrutiny.

"It represents my faith," Heim said, "how it sometimes makes sense to me and sometimes doesn't."

A Bit of Code

The religious views box made its debut in 2006, two years after the launch of Facebook. Before that, users who talked about faith mostly did so in the "About Me" area.

The company had tried a political views box with a drop-down menu of limited choices. The religious views box, however, was created with one key difference: a free-text format that let users type in whatever they wanted. (It proved so popular that Facebook later made its political views box free-text as well.) By contrast, MySpace, another popular social networking site, also offers a religion box, but it's a drop-down menu limited to 14 choices.

Since then, Facebook's beliefs box has generated a staggering number of entries. So exactly how many users put down "beer" as their religion? How many "Catholic"? What correlations exist between religion and number of friends?

Company spokeswoman Meredith Chin declined to answer such questions, citing user privacy. But Chin agreed to compile a list of the most popular religious identities and offered some tantalizing hints at what a full readout might show.

Not surprisingly, the most popular faith professed is "Christian" and the various denominations associated with it. The category is so dominant that for this list, Facebook's statisticians insisted on combining such other designations as "Protestant," "Catholic" and "Mormon" under the "Christian" label. As a result, the second most popular entry on the list is "Islam," followed by "Atheist."

"Jedi," interestingly enough, makes an appearance at No. 10.

The complete catalogue of entries easily numbers in the thousands, Chin said. But even offbeat answers like "Seguidor del Wiccanismo" and "Heavy Metal" garner more than 2,000 users each. There is also, Chin noted with a laugh, a surprising number of people online who identify themselves as Amish.

All this is more than the company has ever revealed on the matter. Yet it still doesn't explain why the box elicits such an intriguing range of answers.

For that, we turn to Katharine Gordon, 29, a Catholic from the District, who joined Facebook two years ago and agonized over what to say about her beliefs.

The problem, she explained, was that she couldn't just type "Catholic" and leave it at that.

"The term comes with a huge asterisk," said Gordon, a civil rights advocate for a nonprofit group. She found herself wanting to add parenthetical clauses to explain her nuanced stances on homosexuality and abortion.

"I'm not exactly looking to discuss the intricacies of the latest papal encyclical with work buddies," she said. "I couldn't help thinking how others would judge me."

She had to consider her strongly secular friends from Bryn Mawr College -- people who might be shocked to hear her talk of God now -- as well as her current friends from the local parish. She could just imagine the reaction at church ("Wait, she doesn't list anything under religious views?").

So after several days, she finally settled on this answer: "Matthew 25," the Bible chapter in which Jesus urges his followers to feed the hungry, clothe the poor and help the imprisoned. His words represent the part of Gordon's faith that she holds most dear.

"It's a bit of code," she said, "so people can make of it what they want."

'Where I Am Right Now'

Such fear of judgment plays an outsize role in how young adults express their religious views online, said Piotr Bobkowski, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina who is in the midst of a two-year grant-funded survey of religion on MySpace. He has found that a significant portion of privately religious young adults -- almost a third in the case of Protestants -- avoid identifying themselves by their traditional sects.

Many teens, Bobkowski said, prefer to portray themselves as spiritual but not religious: "That's why you see all these little one-line creeds popping up."

Such faith online, however, can sometimes be a moving target. What someone believes often changes throughout life. The difference is that the expression of that change is now instantaneous.

It happened to Nikki Jenner, 17, last year. For the longest time, the Howard County teenager listed her view simply as "Judaism." Then, last fall, one of her best friends suddenly died from a heart condition.

Afterward, Jenner found herself asking -- as countless philosophers, believers and seekers have for centuries -- whether God truly exists and, if so, why He allows such death and suffering.

"I'm not sure I believe in God anymore," the high school senior told a friend, "but I know I believe in Max. I believe that he's up there somewhere."

A few weeks later, she logged onto Facebook and changed her religious views to the initials of Max's name: MJLC♥.

"It's just where I am right now in life," she said. "If that changes, maybe I'll feel the need to change the box, too, but for now, this is who I am, what I believe."

Staff writer Jenna Johnson and staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.

Jun 27, 2009

Recruiting: Enough to Make a Monster Tremble

By Matthew Boyle

Corporate recruiter Elisa Bannon of US Cellular in Chicago used to spend up to $4 million a year to post jobs and screen résumés through the three heavyweights of online job search—Monster (MWW), CareerBuilder, and Yahoo! (YHOO) HotJobs.

But with her 2009 budget slashed to $1 million and 2,500 openings to fill, the wireless carrier's director of talent acquisition ditched the big job boards and instead inked a deal with social networking site LinkedIn. For an annual fee of $60,000, Bannon's team now has access to the network's 42 million members, many of whom are employed—the so-called passive candidates that recruiters covet, since conventional wisdom is the best people already have jobs. Using LinkedIn, Bannon made a hire in 30 days for a position that typically takes six months to fill. "It's a great product at an attractive price," she says.

SHRINKING SHARE

For Monster, a publicly traded online job site with $1 billion in sales and 80 million résumés on file, the growing appeal of LinkedIn to recruiters is just one more headache to contend with. Other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are also becoming popular destinations for employers. And niche sites such as TheLadders and BlueSteps, both of which target high earners, are gaining followers among recruiters and job seekers alike. While traffic to Monster is up because of the growing ranks of the newly unemployed, its share of job listings among the big three has declined from nearly 40% in December 2007 to 34% in May of this year, according to job market research and analysis firm Wanted Technologies. And the site saw a 31% drop in revenue last quarter. (Monster gets 90% of its revenues from fees it charges recruiters to post jobs and search its résumé database; the rest comes from advertising.) "The big job boards have peaked," says Gerry Crispin of consultancy CareerXroads.

Monster CEO Sal Iannuzzi, a Wall Street veteran who in 2007 came to the top job, is trying to fight back. "I've spent a significant part of my career fixing things," he says. He has slashed $400 million in costs over the past year, even eliminating paper cups in the break rooms. Iannuzzi also lowered prices for some key customers and hired 130 salespeople—a 31% increase—to win back business. In January, Monster unveiled a cleaner site that, among other things, reduced the number of steps required to upload a résumé from 20 to 4. A career-mapping feature shows job hunters how they can transfer from one field to another.

PLAYING CATCH-UP?

Iannuzzi is also trying to improve customer service, moving call centers back from India to South Carolina. Those efforts pleased customers such as Michael O'Connell, a recruiter in Los Angeles whose firm works for Disney (DIS) and Toyota (TM). He was close to scrapping Monster last month but stayed on thanks to better service, a monthly payment plan, and a price cut. O'Connell is also a fan of LinkedIn—"I use it all day," he says—but argues that it's not yet big enough to supplant Monster. And he stopped using TheLadders two years ago when the company began charging recruiters. (Originally, TheLadders charged only job seekers.)

Iannuzzi's next step is to address the one-size-fits-all nature of Monster's site, which gets about 12 million unique visitors a month. It's rolling out "contextual search" technology that distinguishes between, say, someone who went to Harvard and someone who lives on Harvard Avenue. Iannuzzi calls the technology "game-changing," but rivals beg to differ. "It's an attempt to catch up," says Matt Ferguson, CEO of CareerBuilder, which saw its North American revenue drop 27% in the first quarter. Meanwhile, on June 25, HotJobs launched a "pay-per-performance" product whereby recruiters pay only for qualified candidates.

Unlike listing jobs on the big boards—a process that one recruiter describes as "post and pray"—companies can now choose sites with more distinct services. Along with specialized sites such as TheLadders and Dice, which focuses on technology and health care, there are job search engines such as SimplyHired and Indeed, which trawl the job boards and corporate employment sites to grab every available posting. The employment sections of corporate Web sites have also become more sophisticated. And craigslist has cornered the market for lower-paying jobs with free postings in most areas. By one estimate, there are now 50,000 job sites in the U.S. alone and an equal amount abroad.

SOUPED-UP SEARCH

Perhaps the biggest threat comes from LinkedIn, a six-year-old social networking site with a distinctly professional bent. In January the privately held Mountain View (Calif.) company consolidated the various tools it had been selling to corporate hiring departments into a suite of services called Talent Advantage, which now boasts more than 1,000 customers, double the number it had last year. For $7,000 per user at a client company, hiring managers get a customized Web site, or "dashboard," and souped-up search capability so they can reach out to qualified candidates, individually or in groups. (Recruiters can also buy job postings.) The network even "pushes" candidates to employers who meet preset criteria. While some LinkedIn members may not want to hear from a recruiter, they'll often send the message along to someone else in their network. "Finding passive candidates—that's our sweet spot," says David Hahn, LinkedIn's director of product management. Recruiters agree. "We could not believe the candidates we got" from LinkedIn, says Scott Morrison, director of global recruiting programs at software giant salesforce.com (CRM). "This is a gold mine for us."

Twitter is also gaining traction in the realm of job search. Kara Nickels got an e-mail one morning from an insurance industry client that needed 40 lawyers immediately for a big document review. The legal recruiter quickly sent a message—or "tweet"—to her 150 followers, which was re-twittered by legal blogs that follow her. By the time she arrived at her Chicago office, Nickels had 10 replies and filled every post by lunch. "With job boards it takes a couple days before people look," she says. "But Twitter is immediate. I'll still use the job boards, but if you don't use social media now, you're behind the curve."

With that kind of competition, analysts are skeptical that Monster can retain its top spot. "I'm not convinced [Monster's] new projects are going to revolutionize its portfolio to the point where users and recruiters think about Monster in a new light," says William Morrison, an analyst at investment bank ThinkEquity Partners. "If the job boards don't innovate more often and more quickly, they are going to have a very difficult time growing their businesses over the next several years."

Iannuzzi knows this. "We are not done," he says, hinting that acquisitions could be forthcoming. But even Monster's architects see the writing on the wall. Bill Warren, the founder of an early job board that morphed into Monster, is now executive director of the DirectEmployers Assn., a consortium of corporate employers. He's partnering with the owner of the ".jobs" domain and will launch job sites under that domain later this year. Says Warren: "The days of the big, expensive job boards are over."

Business Exchange: Read, save, and add content on BW's new Web 2.0 topic network

Your Digital Profile

Paper résumés are passé. According to a June 17 NPR segment, recruiters increasingly are looking for evidence that prospective hires are comfortable living in a digital world. LinkedIn profiles are a must, blogs a plus. But beware of what your e-mail address says about you. No cutesy, joint husband-and-wife e-mail addresses, please. Also, at least one executive looks down on AOL (TWX) addresses: "AOL was so 1998," he says.

To listen to the segment, go to http://bx.businessweek.com/recession-job-search/reference/

Boyle is deputy Corporations editor for BusinessWeek.