How To Land An Interview [7 Important Tools]

Do you want to increase your odds of getting an interview? The solution is simple: network. The New York Times highlighted the news that employers (such as Ernst & Young) are ramping up their employee referral hiring. Why? Simple, according to a Mr. Nash of Ernst & Young, “Our analysis shows referred hires perform better, stay longer and are quicker to integrate into our teams.” To support Mr. Nash’s analysis, Giorgio Topa, one of the authors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York study, also referenced in the NYTimes article, states referred employees are 15 percent less likely to quit.

So why are you still throwing your resume in the pile without getting a referral? Could it be because you don’t think you know anyone? Think again. [Read more...]

Hannah Morgan

Hannah Morgan provides no-nonsense help for new job seekers. She provides advice and serves as a guide to traverse the treacherous terrain of today's economy by focusing on pro-active strategies for job search and leveraging social networks. Career Sherpa is one of many outlets where Hannah shares her information. Follow Hannah on Twitter @careersherpa!

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What Social Recruiting Apps Actually Work for Candidates?

tools for career management

You’ve read all the blog posts, articles and ebooks. You’ve heard pundits on TV, radio and down your local pub swearing by the power of social media. It’s the solution to everyone’s customer service gripes, online dating, general time waste and of course your job search.

We’re told recruiters and employers spend all day trawling through random social networks to find their next hire. So what are you doing even reading this, you should be busy branding yourself on social media surely?

Which ones should you use?

How do you know which social tools are actually useful for jobs and which ones are a giant waste of time and effort? Well that’s not easy to tell. They all look equally shiny and typically have a decent content marketer pushing out good stories on a blog.

Is BranchOut going to get you a job? Maybe BrandYourself? No wait, try VisualCV or why not DoYouBuzz. BeKnown is definitely the one. Wait, there’s another one…

If you’re a jobseeker (or an employer) you will have noticed that almost every week there is a new shiny tool, app, plugin, add-on, extension or platform launched in the career space. They all have ‘unique’ features and promise to automate your job search (or candidate search for employers).

You might find yourself signing up to new tools every week and going through the motions of filling in your bio, uploading that photo and connecting with the same people again. By doing this it’s easy to achieve a false sense of achievement, just like spraying out 50 CVs to random companies.

Low barriers to entry

The trouble with online technology is that the barriers to entry are very low, meaning anyone can set up the ‘next big thing’ from their garage. This is of course a great leveller and you would hope the invisible hand of business would sift out the inferior products. Not so I’m afraid. Just as it’s easy to set something up, it’s easy to keep it ticking over as well whilst you decide what to do with it (that’s what they call BETA testing). This situation is not something the end-user will benefit from.

Big companies always succeed surely

And just because a large company launches a new application doesn’t mean it’s going to take off; Monster.com launched BeKnown last year. It was billed the professional network hosted on Facebook and was going to be a game changer. A year later you barely hear about it anymore – those guinea pigs that signed up and did up their profiles, connected with others and started ‘engaging’ must be regretting their early adoption.

What are some of the good ones?

There are a few tools that are genuinely useful and they have either been acquired by the bigger players, such as Rapportive or SlideShare which were both snapped up by LinkedIn. The best way to find out which ones are worth bothering with is to take a step back and let others do the testing for you. Instead of jumping on every new plug-in, wait for reviews to come in and ask your network if they get any use out of ‘Super Cool Plug-in 3.0′.

Bottom line

Social media is about people and a hiring process is about people (I would hope). Use social to identify and contact the right people within an organisation, don’t sign up for another tool that somehow automagically would contact people on your behalf.

If you think a tool looks useful, take a step back and breathe. Read the reviews, ask your peers and do your due diligence. Then you’re ready to invest your time and effort.

What social recruiting tools work for your career management? Please let me know in the comments!

photo by: futileboy

Jorgen Sundberg

The original Undercover Recruiter, after 7 years in tech recruiting Jorgen now runs Link Humans, a social media marketing agency in London.

Filed Under: Job Search, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Why Facebook Sucks for Job Search

no jobs at facebook

Tap the words ‘jobs’ and ‘Facebook’ into Google and see what happens. You will find internal careers at the company and that’s it. How come there is no general careers section on Facebook? Why isn’t there a job board built into the world’s largest social network? You’re not the only one to wonder why this may be.

When Eduardo Saverin, tax refugee and co-founder of Facebook, left and set up Joboozle which is a social network focused on jobs, he didn’t please Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck emailed Eduardo stating he was disappointed and that Facebook would probably do something with jobs.

This indicates that launching a career section on Facebook was definitely on the cards back in the day at ‘The Facebook’. Sure Facebook is a place for friends and family but they all have jobs as well.

What happened? Not much. Instead you had another network called LinkedIn taking the big slice of professional networking and to this day they are dominating the career and social networking space.

So does that mean you can’t find a job on Facebook? Well, there have been a few attempts at cracking this, here are some:

BranchOut

Earlier this year the professional networking app BranchOut was branded a serious contender to LinkedIn. Their user figures grew astronomically to 25 million users and they were apparently signing up 3 users per second. With that rate of sign-ups and the fact that Facebook already have almost 1 billion users, it looked plausible that this app could be a contender to LinkedIn.

A few months later we learn that BranchOut have actually lost members instead. Whether the figures were there to attract more investors or users we don’t know. Some call BranchOut a giant Ponzi scheme, with user-friendly badges.

BeKnown

Monster launched their professional networking tool on Facebook last year called BeKnown. Well, it WasKnown last year but it hasn’t been in the news since. Social Bakers report that BeKnown has 240,000 active users per month and it’s the 481st most popular app on Facebook. So it doesn’t look as a serious contender at this stage. See what one user thinks at How To Find Graduate Jobs on Facebook’s BeKnown.

Company Facebook Pages

Yes there are a few applications that allow Page owners to list jobs on a separate tab. This can be useful when you already know what company you want to work for and you have ‘liked’ the Page already. But that doesn’t help anyone looking for a ‘Java programmer job’ at any company in Manchester. Going the company route is similar to clicking on to the website of a business, then clicking to see current vacancies.

Facebook Social Jobs Partnership

Here’s the most promising initiative of them all, the Social Jobs Partnership is Facebook’s own job listing pilot. This was run as a not-for-profit scheme matching jobseekers positions at local authorities around the US. This is still getting started and Facebook state: “This initiative provides resources to help Americans use technology to find jobs”. Sounds a bit like LinkedIn to me actually.

The future

With Facebook’s disappointing IPO the other month, one can expect them to bring out new features and a proper career section could be one of these. Recruiters and employers are chomping at the bits to be able to search through profiles and contact users for opportunities – surely a lucrative revenue stream for Zuck & co.

What do you think; will Facebook be a place for most people’s social job search one day?

Related: How Facebook is the Worst Place for Networking.

photo by: Robert Scoble

Jorgen Sundberg

The original Undercover Recruiter, after 7 years in tech recruiting Jorgen now runs Link Humans, a social media marketing agency in London.

Filed Under: Facebook Tagged With: , ,

How To Find Graduate Jobs and Internships on Facebook’s BeKnown

 

BeKnown job search

I believe we’ve all heard about BeKnown by now. It’s a Facebook application, which allows users to connect with their Facebook friends in a professional way. The functionalities are very similar to Linkedin but the interface is much more similar to Facebook, combining aspects from both networks.

The app is powered by Monster.com, one of the largest employment websites in the world. They advert BeKnown as a network that provides users with more convenience, control and connections. It all makes sense, at least in theory.

Increasing your network

Once you install BeKnown one of the first things it asks you to do is to invite your Facebook friends to join your network. I started BeKnown with zero connections. One day after it launched I received two invites from Facebook friends. A couple of days passed and my network did not increase, which made me realise I had to start inviting people. After one day, only one person accepted my invite to join BeKnown. Which makes me wonder, how much potential does this network within a network concept will work?

Comparing with LinkedIn, which currently has more than 150 million users and a good number of monthly visitors, Facebook is still the winner with more than 800 million and very high usage. So it might be that Facebook has more potential? Not sure, since the audience is not exactly the same. Remember, we still believe Linkedin is the most important social network.

Profile

BeKnown imports information about your experience and education from your Facebook profile, that’s how I instantly won two badges. Rookie, which everyone gets once you install BeKnown. And the other was Loyal, which I got because I have a 2+ year experience at one single company. I thought it was a fun and clever use of badges, but not sure how professional you can say that is.

The fact you’re able to add a profile picture for BeKnown only is great. It’s an essential feature that allows you to have the looking and feel of a more professional network.

See examples and skip tasks

BeKnown wants you to be up and running in their network, so it keeps showing you messages when parts of your profile are not complete. I simply loved the way they did it! Linkedin could learn some lessons here. To complete the remaining fields in my CV it shows me a specific task, which I can decide to skip and another task will show up. Very clever!

I also liked how BeKnown shows examples for the different fields in the profile. When you decide to write your summary you can click on “see examples” and it will explain what it expects you to write giving you an actual example. Genius. Very helpful.

Job Search

This feature is not very different from Monster.com does.

But there is one feature I really liked – Jobs for Friends. This shows what jobs match your connections. At first, this doesn’t sound very interesting and it doesn’t make a lot of sense. But when you see the reward icon, you get excited. You’re able to make money by recommending your friends. Right now in my network there’s a job matching one of my connections, this specific job would pay me $369 for a recommendation. How cool is that?

The conclusions

It is hard to get connections. You or your friends might not be interested in maintaining a professional relationship, specially through Facebook. Professional networks are not like Facebook networks. It not only about who you know. It’s about who you know and will add value to you, either now or in the future. And let’s be honest, I don’t think 80% of my Facebook friends would.

It is more playful. I don’t say that only because of the badges, even though they are a very different element from other professional networks. It’s about the language and features such as skiping tasks and see examples. I like that, it makes it more fun.

A network within a network won’t work. I don’t think this concept will work. We’ve seen some other apps doing that on Facebook, but most of them were games. Even though BeKnown and Facebook have totally different purposes, I don’t believe someone can maintain two different networks in one single space (with the same friends!). It gets confusing. People quit MySpace to go to Facebook in the US, in Brazil people are quitting Orkut to go to Facebook. I believe you can only maintain two when you have a different and more segmented group of people, like Linkedin is for me.

And how about you, did you have a chance to play around with BeKnown? Please share your thoughts, I’d love to know whether I’m the only one who doesn’t see a long future for this application.

Further reading at: How Generation Y Use Facebook for Professional Networking (Infographic).

Cristina Dresch is part of the social recruiting training team at Link Humans in London.

Laurence Hebberd

Laurence Hebberd is Community Manager for Link Humans in London. He also runs the Link Humans Twitter feed - @LinkHumans.

Filed Under: Facebook, Graduate, Intern, Job Board, Job Search Tagged With: , , , ,