As a student getting ready to start job hunting in a few month, I was very excited to read articles for this week about job hunting using social media. I was not sure about the whole idea of using social networking sites for my job hunting because I only used facebook, blogs and twitter for my leisure, thankful to this class I became more open minded about the social networking and business.
"The Blog is the New Resume" was very inspiring as it talked about how people are now able to present themselves without any control (good, or bad?) to the recruiters. You can post about your education, past experience etc.. in the way that no original paper resume could have presented about you. "Social networking has its perks" talked about use of Profiles (such as Facebook and LinkedIn) and Twitter in job hunting. It is important to have a consistent character in all of those accounts, and people should present more about their business skills then personal stuff.
I was very excited to see these ideas, but it left me with one big question. I felt like job hunting using social media may not work in trying to get a job at larger companies. The question is whether the recruiter will have time to go through all that we posted online about ourselves. A blog, facebook profile, LinkedIn profile, twitter, is a lot to look through. Once my internship boss told me they have about 15,000 applicants every year for about 30 positions available, and they don't even have time to look through everyone's paper cover letter carefully enough. It's an extreme case, but I think that this method does not work for larger companies like this, who gets very large number of applicants. Through more research and this week's class, I hope I could find answer to the question or know more about job hunting using social media in larger companies.
What Harry Means to Me
12 years ago
Very interesting point about larger companies. However, some of these companies actually have Facebook pages that they use for recruitment, like Ernst & Young and Warner Brothers. Also, having a blog or a social media resume can help you stand out among 15,000 applicants.
ReplyDeleteGreat post. Recently, I am also searching for summer internship,so I'm very interested in these articles, and your post. I think large companies also can find insightful employees by using social networking resume.
ReplyDeleteI think that traditional ways of hiring will last longer in larger companies as they have less emphasis on being personal and focus on being as efficient as possible. But, in smaller companies, the value of one's blog and online presence is certainly high.
ReplyDeleteWith the larger companies, it seems that you'd have to try that much harder to stand out from 15,000 applicants. I don't think the blog replaces the resume, but is an important extra that could help you beat out the competition if written well-enough.
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