Increase Your Reputation Through Association
Even if you don't have a whole lot of star power
right off the bat, you can get some by finding associations that take some of that shine off others and rubs
it onto you via personal association. If you know someone who is a big figure in the financial services
realm, for instance, why not see if he/she wants to connect with you online. Can you get him/her to give you
a recommendation on LinkedIn? Did you do a project together that you are proud of? Why not let others know
who you are working with and let them see that you are really a person with major connections and influence.
This can help to attract other people who float around in the same influential
circles.
If you have a financial blog, for instance, start
to network with other financial bloggers. See if you can do a blog carnival or a guest post on some blogs
with better exposure. This can lead to being associated with better people and having more followers or
friends.
What Not To Say On Your
Profile
You can still make a few mistakes online that will
kill your chances with prospective employers. You don't want to post pictures that are too revealing or that
show you engaged in some activity that makes you look like a drunk, a druggie, or a slob. If that's the image
you are cultivating, you can be sure that there aren't that many companies out there that want to be
associated with that type of reputation.
You may want to post a semi-naked picture on an
online dating site, but this is social network suicide for anyone other than a porn industry professional.
Most people are offended by photos that are in bad taste, and you won't engage as many people in your network
as you would if you just took a safer approach. If you wouldn't put it on a resume, don't add it to your
social networking profile.
What About The
Resume?
With the advent of social networking sites, we may
actually be seeing the death of the conventional resume. With several million people unemployed, and most
resumes being scanned via computer before a human being even sees it, it just may increase your chances to
trash the resume and to stick with the social networking sites, where you have far better exposure. If you
can find someone to connect to directly in your social network, it sure beats trying to game a flooded system
with a paper copy of your resume.
In addition, there are many more recruiters who are
looking for good candidates online. They want to find people who are not aggressively looking for work, but
are great matches for their companies. The more confident, strong, and engaged in the process of creating
your own income in a specific industry, regardless of whether you have an employer or are self-employed, the
higher the likelihood that you will gain attention from these recruiters.
What About
References?
Put yourself in the position of a hiring manager.
You have just received over 300 paper resumes to go through. Maybe they've found a few candidates online from
their own online activities that caught their eyes better. They might schedule a few interviews. For those
who are online, they don't need to request references if they already have samples of work in an online
portfolio and virtual recommendations from people in their network. The work speaks for itself. This is
particularly true of public relations and freelance job hunters. They don't have to get a prior employer to
vouch for them via telephone because their network is transparent to anyone who visits their social
networking profile. That's even before they've been contacted for a job.
What about the person who followed the traditional
route? They have to engage the hiring manager and gather up documents, fill out applications, and hope that
their references answer the phone or are still employed at these companies. In this type of economic climate,
it might be that all of your references have lost their jobs too. What do you do then? If you are on a social
network, you'll have kept in touch and have gotten those references upfront to keep the network intact and to
even extend it, if the old contact lands a plumb job at a new company in your field. As for the hiring
manager, they only have to log into a social network to find out who you know and what projects you've worked
on, if they happen to use LinkedIn.
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