Job Search Skills: Getting Control of Your Social Media Presence

How do you view social media as a part of the job search? Is it a positive tool for helping you track down positions and reach the people and decision-makers who really matter? Or is it a minefield to be negotiated—a realm where you have so many accounts and profiles that they’re a nightmare to keep track of, and a source of constant worry about how you’re representing yourself to potential employers?

Whatever your take on it, the folks at Wired have put together a simple-to-follow wiki that can help you get control and squeeze more value (and a lot of worry) out of your online presence. In a nutshell: it’s a guide to building a social profile through which you can link to each and every piece of the social media realm in which you already participate.

The major advantage to doing so is summed up perfectly in this excerpt from the wiki: “The deeper and more fully fleshed-out your presence is on a trusted service […] the easier it is for your friends to find you, and the harder it is for anyone to impersonate you.”

Bear in mind: it’s not only your friends that will want to find you online. Every time you apply for a job, there’s a strong chance that someone with the power to affect a hiring decision will be seeking you out in cyberspace—a chance that increases exponentially the closer you come to actually being offered a job. Bearing that in mind, perhaps it’s worth taking the time to organize and tailor exactly what those people can discover about you. Even if that doesn’t involve the sort of public profile Wired is advocating, it should definitely include an examination of your privacy settings on Facebook (especially when it comes to photos—it’s so easy to end up tagged in a picture you didn’t even know was online) and a scan (and potential removal) of any tweets or status updates that may compromise your image as the consummate professional.