Social Media Scores Affecting your Potential Jobs
The game of being hired has been dramatically changed. It used to be a hopeless attempt of adding a drop of water to the pool and hoping your contribution would be noticed. LinkedIn has become a huge network for resume building and recommendations, not to mention giving the ability to research your every detail with the simple information of your name. As you are involved in Social Media, either through creating a Facebook, Twitter, G+, Blogger, Tumblr or any other social media account, more information is available to potential employers. Cleaning up your online portfolio has become increasingly important, the information you freely share about yourself can either be points in your favor or against you regardless of how amazing your work ethic may be.
Steps to Clean up you Online Portfolio
This is an essential step for closing in on an interview. You have jumped the first hurdle of being picked out of the many applicants, now you have reached the second of being searched online for any further information that your resume may not reveal. This second step may happen without you even knowing, this is why it is imperative that you take into account your online presence as a secondary portion to your resume and cover letter.
1. Google yourself and see what comes up, you will be astonished at the information available on the internet.
2. Make a list of all your online Accounts and make sure to not skip over any.
3. Cleaning up your Google Plus profile.
Unlike Facebook, you can not prevent someone from adding you to their G+ profile. Everything that you write on your G+ page is visible to potential employers once they have added you to their circle. Going through your G+ page is very important. Delete any and all inappropriate posts or pictures.
If you do not have a Google Plus account create one. Google Plus Account Set-Up
Start building your Google Profile, add a tagline (selling point) about you, add your past employers in your circles and also use G+ to add potential employers you are interested in. Here’s our Google Plus page, add us to your circles to keep updated. Customer Paradigm.
4. Cleaning up your Facebook profile.
The only item that people can see when they search for you is your profile picture. If your current profile picture could be categorized as inappropriate, change it to something that is more professional.
The fastest fix to monitoring what potential employers can see about you, is to go to your privacy settings and set each section to only be visible to current friends. For example if you are being hired by a Vet, and you have liked a lot of pages to do with animal care or animal causes, you may want to show this to your employer and not hide the visibility. Remember, each social media outlet is a potential resume bullet point, so make them count in the right places.
5. Keeping the LinkedIn profile relevant and up-to-date.
LinkedIn is a networking site of professionals, this should be your main focus. Spend some time updating your profile relevant to the jobs you are interested in. Make sure to request recommendations from past employers, and join groups of interest to your field.
Everything that is on your resume should at minimal be on your LinkedIn profile, it is easy for employers to spot discrepancies between your profile and resume. By cleaning up your profile now you avoid the awkward interview question.
6. Go through other existing blogs, websites, online profiles.
By now you understand the goal of cleaning up your social media profiles. Start going through any of your other existing accounts, be cautious of images, posts and even friends posts. Remember if there are available privacy settings, use those to maintain your audience to your social profiles.
Join Customer Paradigm’s Facebook page for Social Media News and Updates!