How Social Media Can Help You In Your Job Search

Social media is often thought of as a platform for personal use and not a tool to utilize on a professional level. However, there are several reasons why social media is important in any job search and for career progression. 

Social media is being used on a daily basis to identify, recruit, and verify potential candidates. It’s estimated that over 90 percent of recruiters use social media to screen applicants. In fact, a majority of hiring managers begin looking at social media channels as soon as they receive an application. With such a presence in the virtual world, that’s why social media is important—it can make or break a job search.

Most recruiters today will go through your social media profiles as part of the recruitment process. The aim of doing this is to learn more about you and gain insights about you that they cannot glean from your CV.

They want to look beyond your qualifications and see other things such as your character, your personality, your passion in the industry, your soft skills, and whether you will fit into the company culture.

To do this, they don’t restrict themselves to LinkedIn, since they already know that it is automatic for you to carry yourself in a professional manner on the platform. Instead, they also look at your profiles in platforms that are more socially geared, such as Facebook and Twitter.

For anyone pondering the importance of social media in a job search, consider the following reasons why social media is important in ANY job search—including yours.

How Social Media Can Help You In Your Job Search

Your choice of social media platforms should be determined by your industry. Are there some social platforms that work best for your line of work?

For instance, if you are a designer, you might need an Instagram or Pinterest account to showcase your work. Alternatively, you can use YouTube to showcase your talent or expertise.

You should also use your social profiles as platforms to show off your work and expertise. Upload samples of your work on your social profiles and share them with your connections or post links to your presentations or online portfolio. You can also show your expertise by sharing your well researched thoughts and opinions about trends and happenings within your industry.

And while I’m all for being yourself and showing your unique kick-ass personality, it should also be done in a professional manner.

Recruiters and hiring managers scope you out on social media to get a feel for who you are and to see if you’d be a great fit with the company culture. Give them a reason to hire you with your online footprint. Don’t give them a reason to shake their head and delete your CV. 

Manage your Reputation

The first thing you need to do is to make sure your online presence paints the picture of a professional.

70% of employers are relying on social media as a tool for screening prospects, with 54% rejecting candidates because of something they found on the candidate’s social media.

This shows that having an online presence that does not look professional can hurt your chances of getting hired. Therefore, the first thing you need to do is to clean up your social profiles. To know what information prospective employers can see about you, open an incognito tab on your browser and Google your name.

What comes up?

Will prospective employers like what they see?

If there is anything that can hurt your chances of getting hired, get rid of it. This includes things like the drunk photos from your college parties and stupid status updates.

Clean up your social media accounts. Your social media pages are probably going to be on the list of what shows up when you search for yourself. Be sure that all your posts are fit for the public to see. If not, clean them up and adjust your privacy settings.

When you share things online, feel free to be yourself but be the best version of yourself. Watch your language, keep images PG-friendly, and never, ever, ever bad mouth current or former companies or coworkers you’ve worked with.

What You Need To Know About Applicant Tracking Systems

What You Need To Know About Applicant Tracking Systems. We've all been there: You find the perfect job opportunity, submit your application online, and within a few seconds you receive a rejection letter. 

So what happened? 

Well you didn't pass the infamous six-second resume review test by ATS systems. 

What many job seekers don't realise is that of job applications are rejected before they are seen by human eyes. Before your resume reaches the hands of a live person, it often must pass what is known as an applicant tracking system.

If you are seeking a job, you might have noticed that even after submitting your CV, you don’t get feedback. Why? It’s probably the ATS!

Below is everything you need to know about applicant tracking systems — and what you can do to optimize your CV and beat these bots.

How do applicant tracking systems (ATS) work?

Today, more and more companies turn to Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) to manage the hiring process more efficiently. With ATS, a recruiter or hiring manager simply plugs in a few keywords and can seen in an instant which CV match their criteria.

If you’re applying to a large organisation, chances are you’ll face an ATS. If you’re applying through any online form, you’re applying through an ATS. 

Applicant tracking systems act as an electronic gatekeeper for an employer. The ATS parses a CV's content into categories and then scans it for specific keywords to determine if the job application should be passed along to the recruiter. Its job is to essentially weed out unqualified applicants so the recruiter can devote his or her time to evaluating the candidates who are more likely to be a match for the position. In other words, the ATS is apt to toss the least-qualified candidates, rather than identify the applicants who are the best fit.

Unfortunately, that means if a CV is not written and formatted with the applicant tracking system in mind, a qualified candidate can be easily passed over. 

Keyword Searches

First of all, these systems are designed to look for specific keywords and types of backgrounds for advertised positions, meaning good candidates might slip through the cracks of the system unnoticed.

As a job seeker, if your application doesn’t have these keywords, you can bet it finds its way into the garbage, never to be seen again.

So, before you hit send on a job application, make sure you take the time to properly customize your resume to the specific job you’re applying to. A big part of this is keyword optimization, the process of strategically placing keywords throughout your resume so it’s more easily searched (and foudn!) by ATS.

The simplest way to incorporate more relevant keywords into your resume is by scanning the job ad you’re applying to. When reading it, jot down keywords that stand out — often these are the job title itself as well as must-have hard skills and soft skills.

There also can be technical issues. Some systems will eliminate candidates if they can't interpret a scanned resume properly. This can happen if a resume looks slightly different than what the system is programmed to understand, or if the resume is more complex than it can interpret.

Here’s our simplest advice for how to beat ATS:

• Carefully tailor your CV to the job description every single time you apply.
• Optimise for ATS search and ranking algorithms by matching your resume keywords to the job description
• Avoid images, charts, and other graphics
• Use a clean CV design with a clear hierarchy
• Use both the long-form and acronym version of keywords (e.g. “Master of Business Administration (MBA)” or “Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”) for maximum searchability
• Don’t use tables or columns on your CV as they often cause major parsing errors
• Use a traditional resume font like Times, Helvetica
• Don’t use headers or footers in your CV as the information might get lost or cause a parsing error
• Use standard CV section headings like “Work Experience” rather than being cute or clever (“Where I’ve Been”)
• Save your file as a .docx if possible

Remember, you have to get through the ATS before you can impress a hiring manager. If your formatting choices confuse the ATS, the application might not get through to them in the first place.

Article Sources: The Balance, JobScan