Social Media Jobs blog

With the global financial crisis starting to bite, companies have begun to look very closely at their core employment strategies — with a stream of layoffs starting to take place. If you find yourself in this situation, then I do hope you find a match for your skills, interests and experience on the SocialMediaJobs board. But regardless of whether you have a job or are looking for one, Jeremiah Owyang offers some very sound advice — do a GUT check.

The GUT check is a three step program which you should commence IMMEDIATELY. It includes:

1. Grow your network before you need them
2. Uncomfortable leads to growth
3. Tout your success

To grow your network before you need it means joining groups of professionals within your industry. It means attending conferences, coffee meetings, informal get togethers and the like. It means contributing to industry groups on LinkedIn. It means writing a blog and commenting on others.

You also need to take yourself out of your comfort zone. It is only when you are uncomfortable that you are able to take a leap in terms of learning and professional development. Find someone to mentor you. Ask for advice or help. Volunteer your time on a colleague’s project.

Finally, you need to be able to cleverly articulate your successes (remember, blogs are the new CV). Build your story. Explain who you are to people. Whittle it down to 30 seconds and practice explaining how you have grown throughout your career.

So what are you waiting for? Go with your GUT instinct. There is not a second to lose.

I have seen a lot of bad resumes in my time. I may even have written a few. But no matter whether you are writing a resume for a social media role or any other type of job, there are a few things you need to consider:

1. Keep your eyes on the prize: What is your overall career goal? Think about it. How will you explain this through your resume. How can you show the consistent story between jobs? Where did you make a change in your career path and why. Use your resume to show how all your previous work builds towards the role you are applying for.
2. Scan the market: This is a basic one, but many people fail at the first step. If you are applying for a new role, scan the market and find out what other jobs are being advertised in your category. Check what is required for similar roles and match this against your experience. Explain in your resume where the strengths coincide and where there are gaps that you are working on either via education, training or on-the-job experience.
3. Use the same language: When employers are scanning your resume, they are looking for a good match. They already have a certain style of language in their head and they will use this to evaluate your resume. Make sure you are hitting the keywords from the job advertisement in your resume.
4. Don’t lie: People have a tendency to “overstate” their skills and experience when applying for new jobs. Don’t. In an increasingly connected world, your “footprints” can be easily followed and if you are stretching the truth you will eventually be found out. Remember, reputation is your calling card. Guard it carefully.
5. Explain the KPIs: Explain how your past duties and responsibilities were measured. Show how your outcomes matched or exceeded those key performance indicators. After all, we all want to hire people who DELIVER on the promises they make.

Many people think that LinkedIn is only good for finding a job … or for researching the people who are about to interview you. But it is a whole lot more than this.

Social Media folks will understand the power of a network, but spend a surprisingly small amount of time tending to professional online networks such as LinkedIn. But while Facebook is obviously more “social”, there are some huge benefits to creatively using LinkedIn. Take a look at this excellent explanation of LinkedIn from Lee LeFever from CommonCraft.com, then think about how YOU use LinkedIn. How can you improve? Where is a gap? Oh, and what are your secrets. Please share!

As older, Baby Boomer workers begin to retire in the next 3-5 years, they will take with them a wealth of organisational and business knowledge. They will take with them the relationships that they have built up over a lifetime and the experience to understand how best, and when to activate those relationships in pursuit of business. At the same time, the Generation Y workforce will wash through your business, bringing with them a profoundly different approach to work.

The challenge will be to manage this transition and to find ways of accelerating the transfer of knowledge and skills from one group to another. Interestingly, I expect that this transfer will not just be one-way. In a post entitled Enterprise 2.0: It’s Not Your Dad’s Company, I explain that this transition has already commenced:

Those peppy Gen Y kids who were brought into the business to inject some life and energy are moving up. That’s right, they have been steadily building their experience, lobbying the line management and pushing through the KPIs in the yearly 360 degree reviews … and guess what? They are now making business decisions. Yes, indeed, Gen Y are reaching the management level, and working the matrix — and they will bring a new style and a new approach to your business.  This will transform the way that we all work. Indeed, it has to.

Let’s face it, employers are not in business for the short term … but it is also a challenge to think strategically about your business. After all, there are monthly and quarterly quotas to meet, reports to write, financial and legal obligations to fullfil … and somewhere in there, you have to work with your customers. But it is important to consider how your workforce will change … because the next 5+ years will demonstrate EXACTLY how true the old workforce adage is “my company’s people are its best asset”.

Here are THREE tips to help kick-start your thinking:

• Attraction: What is it about your brand that is attractive to younger workers? Think about the non-cash benefits that can make your business a Gen Y employer of choice.
• Mentor: What mentoring processes do you have in place? How can you bring the experience of older workers into the same space as your younger workers? Consider “buddy” style programs.
• Accelerate: Gen Y are notoriously impatient. Stretch their skills. Give them opportunity, but also boundaries. Remember you want them to succeed, or to fail fast and start again.

Businesses are, or should be, planning for the long term. After all, why start a business if you don’t plan on being around in the next five or more years? And while we have heard platitudes for years that “employees are our best assets”, few companies have been able to successfully systematise this theme in any meaningful way.

However, just over the horizon … in the next five years we will be seeing a massive shift in the nature and make-up of our workforces. The retirement of the “baby boomer” generation will see knowledge and experience disappearing from businesses all around the world. The corresponding intake of “Generation Y” is expected to match the numbers of retirees. But the losses around business knowledge and experience are going to force employers to look closely at their training, enablement and knowledge transfer programs. But before you can even get to training, you first need to ATTRACT staff to your business.

This video explains the way that some large scale businesses in Prague are looking at the workforce challenges. BASF, SAP and Evanic Industries are seeking to attract the lucrative and motivated Gen Y crowd and have begun to transform the way that they position employment and structure roles. Those companies that are actively involved in, and understand, social media are beginning to see that this is a creative differentiator in the war for talent.

How are you dealing with a global skills shortage? What makes your business a great place to work? I’d love to hear your stories.

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Normally when you apply for a job you spend some time updating your resume to reflect the job description given. You also work to finesse a cover letter that links your experience and qualifications into a compelling story that will prompt the recruiter to call you in for an interview.

But in the world of social media, this is unlikely to be the only touchpoint that you will have with your potential new employer (or agent).

If you have a LinkedIn or Facebook profile, a Twitter ID, a Flickr account or a blog, then you will also have a pre-existing record of your social and professional interactions scattered, yet searchable by Google. And ANY recruiter needing to hire someone for a social media role will be pre-screening all applicants — you can bet on it. As I have explained previously:

… blogs allow others to gain a deeper understanding of the person blogging. The posts become a repository of their ideas as well as a journal of their intellectual and creative pursuits. Interestingly, the WAY in which bloggers deal with their readers/audience/community says a lot — and smart employers will do well to check very closely through the archive of postings prior to any interview.

So what does this mean for the job seeker? First some basics:

1. Consolidate your IDs: If you have an online ID, make sure you consolidate them all under a single, common name/handle. For example, I use servantofchaos wherever I go — but can also be found as Gavin Heaton. This can sometimes cause confusion. Start with your name and keep it if you can.
2. Own your own domain: Check whether yourname.com is available and register it.
3. Complete your profiles: Your “about” page can be one of the most important items on your blog. Same with your Twitter home page. Make sure you provide enough “context” for visitors so that they get to “know you” a little.

Once you have the basics covered, you need to become active in the community in which you want to work:

1. Participate in the conversation: Your new employer will be looking to see whether you can “walk the walk”. This is most clearly demonstrated by the content you produce, the WAY you interact with others online and the breadth of your network.
2. Show your thinking: If you don’t have a body of produced work, make sure you put plenty of your “thinking” online. Don’t just rehash someone else’s work — think about what works and how it could be improved. I remember reading something by Stan Johnson along these lines (though I can’t find it). This will demonstrate your ability to communicate and translate ideas into something more tangible.

These are just a couple of tips to help get you started. Add your own tips to the comments below!

If you are new to social media, you may be wondering why should you post your job ad here on socialmediajobs.com.au. The answer is quite simple really:

• Only people who are looking SPECIFICALLY for social media related jobs will be coming here. We will not be catering for a wider stream of job seeker
• We are using social media such as Twitter, blogs and good old fashioned word-of-mouth to inform people of the site. This means that the folks who apply are already ACTIVE social media participants
• Because social media is still relatively new, those with the experience are those who are passionate. The fact that someone applies for your role through this site indicates that they come with some level of actual experience — or at least access to a strong, collaborative, global community

Finally, this site is about connecting the connectors. “Connectors” are those in a community who know a large number of people, or as Malcolm Gladwell suggests, are people “who link us up with the world”. These people are essential to the success of any social media effort — and you will find more of them here than on the generic job sites.

And, as always, your feedback is more than welcome.

Looking for a new job can take a great deal of time and effort. Not only do you have to build up and finesse your resume, you have to search various job boards on a variety of websites. But if you are looking for a role in social media, what do you search under? You could start with “media”, but then shift to “pr” and then even to “marketing” or “IT”. Of course, it all depends on the categories that your potential new employer has chosen.

This site seeks to bring together social media-related job seekers and employers. We only list social media-related jobs — so if you are a job seeker you know what you will find here. And employers benefit by being able to place their vacancies before an active and very targeted community of job seekers.

What does it cost?

At this stage, listing a job and applying for a job is absolutely free.