Being headhunted for the perfect job is nothing more than a pipe dream for most people seeking employment. Fortunately, this is less because companies aren’t recruiting and more because most professionals don’t make it easy enough for potential employers to find them online. What the less tech savvy of us don’t realise is that the Web provides an almost free way to promote ourselves. My tips today focus on a few things that you can do to help employers find you.
Follow these tips and get potential employers to notice you online. Image Credit: MyOpera
1. Focus on your Google CV
For potential employers, your Google CV is first impression they have of you. And let’s face it, first impressions count. Of course, step one is making sure that you appear in the search results in the first place. Step two is making sure you’re there for the right reasons. It’s important that the first few results portray you in the way which you want potential employers to see you. They need to be professional and informative. If this isn’t the case, the best way to build a CV or push less positive results to the bottom of the search results is by the addition of relevant, good quality content. This should preferably be related to the industry in which you work or are hoping to work and ideally should portray the very best version of yourself.
There are a number of great ways to improve your Google CV through the addition of content in one form or another. One good way is by writing articles on industry related topics. These will not only help your search rankings but will also position you as an expert (provided you have something intelligent to say of course.) Starting a blog or setting up your own website is also a great way to go – the continued addition of fresh relevant content will impress recruiters and show your interest in and commitment to your profession. Getting into social networking and setting up profiles on sites like Facebook and LinkedIn will also help your ranking. This is not something that you should dive into without a measure of planning and good sense though. Keep reading for a few more guidelines on making a success of this.
2. Use online recruiters
Of course, one of the best ways to put yourself out there is by building professional profiles on recruitment websites. For a number of organisations, this is the most logical first port of call in their search for new staff. Of course, if your CV isn’t uploaded, they have no way to find you or even to establish that you exist. Most of these websites allow you to post your CV too – and this is of course the most ideal way to illustrate your experience and expertise in your field. While there are a number of sites available to you, you’ll find that many of these are locally relevant. In South Africa, try Career Junction or Career Jet. In the UK, try the UK Jobs Network or Total Jobs.
3. Manage your reputation
As someone hoping to get recruited, it’s important to realise that however useful the Web is, it can be an enemy as well as a friend. Blurring the boundaries between what’s public and what’s private, it’s quite possible that a potential employer might be able to find those pictures from your gap year that you never really wanted anyone except for your nearest and dearest to have access to. Depending on how you behave when you’re out of the office, this could be a very bad thing. As difficult as it sometimes is, it’s important to keep your online reputation clean or mitigate any damage that might have already been done. As far as you’re concerned, a large part of this is being aware of your privacy settings on social networking sites and keeping your profiles relatively clear of your misdemeanors – consider how you want strangers to see you and decide whether this is the version of yourself portrayed by your profiles. Of course, there are the things that other people may or may not have said about you online. In order to manage this, you need to have some idea of what people are saying and a strategy for dealing with it should they say something very negative. Try Google Alerts or a BrandsEye Blogger account to help you with the first part. For the second, there are a few ways you could handle it. Check out my post on dealing with a reputation crisis for more.
4. Ensure that your profiles work for you
Your social networking profiles, both professional and personal, don’t have to give a bad impression of you and they could still eliminate you from the shortlist for your dream job. This could be for any number of reasons. However, you have the power to make your profiles work for you. Here’s how: Start by evaluating what they say about you as a person and the perception that they create. This needs to be considered against your desired perception – how do you want people to see you? Your information can then be changed accordingly. Other good practices are to keep your profile up to date and ensure that you include relevant work experience and contact information. Of course, it is also important that you understand what your connections say about you – being friends with a whole lot of charming individuals suspected of being integrally linked to a terrorist group, for example, may not be seen as an endorsement of your upstanding character.
5. Get creative
When looking online, recruiters usually have hundreds if not thousands of potential employees available to them. That makes it a little difficult to stand out and make sure that you are someone who makes it onto the shortlist. The only way to make this happen is by being different or creative enough that you are sure to get noticed. In my experience, the quirkier your efforts, the more likely you are to get hired. Our intern candidates are always finding new ways to impress us, and those who do are almost sure to get an interview. Immediately springing to mind are Andrew Kirby’s virtual CV and Stacey Hutton’s Hitler Meme. Needless to say, both of them now have a seat in the office. Of course, the degree to which you have the freedom to be creative is industry dependent (I don’t think many of the accounting firms I know of would have appreciated Stacey’s clip quite like we did), but in every field there are things you can do to make yourself stand out. And provided it’s appropriate, many recruiters will be impressed by your effort and commitment, if nothing else.
Also check out:
Traditional Jobboards are still only making their databases of candidates available to Recruiters who then on-sell these candidates at inflated fees. At JobCrystal (www.jobcrystal.co.za) we have removed that step and allow employers to directly access jobseekers profiles by doing their own filtering and then contacting the candidates directly for free. They only pay a flat fee if the placement is successful.
Employers are in control of what they search for and who they choose to talk to - no more hours of poring over CV's and long delays in receiving CV's.
Posted by Karl Westvig on 2010/06/02