020 Joshua Waldman: Job Searching with Social Media for Dummies

Career Tips & Trends with Tom McDonough & Deborah Burkholder

09/27/12 • 20 min

Internet radio for savvy professionals –
doing work you love, work that matters.

Personal branding author and entrepreneur, Joshua Waldman, joins us today. Joshua is the author of Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies, and writes the careerenlightenment.com blog.

We met Joshua at the Career Thought Leaders conference earlier this year. And we’re delighted to be able to continue our conversation with Joshua so our listeners can hear what his latest thoughts are directly from him.

His teaching (and use) of technology and marketing skills helping businesses grow and job seekers get noticed is quite impressive. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to go to the Career Enlightenment site and sign up for his blog.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

From the show

I think that we passed the time of choice with social media in the job search and there is a lot of statistic to back up the fact that recruiters, in particular, and hiring managers, more generally, are using social media, whether they admit it or not.

I think everybody is googling everybody and I think more specifically that recruiters are finding candidates as well as engaging with candidates via social media, sort of part and parcel of the process these days. Ten million Americans found their jobs with www.linkedin.com and eighteen million with www.facebook.com so there is a lot of evidence to show that if you aren’t on social media your competition most certainly is.

... baby boomers have an incredible advantage over new people in the workforce and that is that they have many, many years of experience being professional and that professionalism, that skill in networking, translates remarkably well when applied to social media.

One of the biggest changes we are seeing is the adoption of talent pools or talent communities because at the end of the day a candidate is going to be passionate about a brand or a company but that company might, or might now, have an active job requisition.

So the problem is as they are writing their profiles, some job seekers are not thinking about how they are messaging themselves, how their image is coming across, how they are going to be consistent across many different channels and they end up looking flaky.

One more time in summary, the three most important steps in doing a job search online are...

What I see most is, well nobody likes pain, and for most people networking is painful. Raise your hand if you are an introvert and you will know what I am talking about. Let’s say you are a job seeker and you have a choice. You can go out and network locally or you can go on LinkedIn and start sending e-mails out to people, but that is kind of painful or uncomfortable, so I think I am going to reword my headline and rewrite that bio and do a new picture, etc. A lot of people tend to shy away from that face to face interaction to a more solitary type of fill out the profile type of activity and we just have to be careful that we aren’t choosing one painful stimulus over a worse painful stimulus.

The most expensive mistake that a hiring manager can make is hiring the wrong person and so are you who you say you are?

Listen to the full interview by clicking player above.

We’d love to hear from you in terms of your actionable takeaways from this episode.

RESOURCES

What do you want?

80% of finding work you love, work that fits you is knowing what you want. If you don’...

09/27/12 • 20 min

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