Maintain an Online Presence for Better Job Offers
Today’s job market is more competitive than ever, making it necessary to have something more to offer than just a killer handshake and a great resume.
The goal is to prove your worth to potential employers, to demonstrate your unique qualifications and solid work ethic.
Keeping an active presence online might be just the thing to land you a better job and securing your financial future.
Maintain an online presence and you position yourself as an expert in your field, rather than one of many candidates who coast through a career on the heels of others’ accomplishments.
Building your own online profile helps you prove your worth to potential employers even before you meet, and brings unadvertised job opportunities into focus, something listed outside of the popular jobseeker websites.
Here are a few ways to build an online presence that hooks potential employers’ interests and introduces them to your unique style for a better job search.
Create a Business Blog
Blogs have developed into valuable business tools over the years, something more than the personal musings of the average person.
You can create a specific blog tailored to your industry or niche, then utilize it to demonstrate your expertise in that field. An experienced restaurant manager, for example, might create posts like these to showcase their knowledge and experience:
- Follow This Golden Rule to Enhance Employee Performance
- Five Simple Tricks to Improving your Service Times
- The Ins and Outs of Maintaining your Inventory
- Why Your Restaurant Has Such a High Turnover
- 3 Secret Tips for Handling Diner Complaints Efficiently
If your resume is an accurate reflection of your experience and skill, you’ll have no trouble creating blog posts tailored to your industry’s most pertinent topics of discussion.
A simple job description or keyword search will reveal what topics employers are interested in reading.
Check out a few online job boards, search for the position you’re seeking, and analyze the responsibilities required for the job. Then, create a list of these responsibilities and create a few blog posts on each of these topics.
An informative blog shows employers how knowledgeable you are in your current industry. This is an entirely different concept than the short answers you give to interview questions that reveal little about you and what you’re capable of.
If you’re strategic, you’ll have addressed some of the more pressing problems your potential employers need help with on your blog. This gives you a considerable advantage when competing for offline jobs.
Use Social Networking Opportunities
Corporations and small businesses are beginning to embrace social media as a viable form of communication and marketing.
In the right hands, these accounts develop networks, analyze trends, build customer loyalty, and find potential employees. Creating a strong social networking presence is now as important for business as it has ever been for personal contacts.
LinkedIn is one of the most unique social networking sites on the web today. Fill out a complete profile on the site and master some of the basic functions.
Include a business photo, a link to your blog, and links to other social networking profiles you may have online that show your best characteristics.
LinkedIn is a popular site for business contacts and company employees, so using it can help you get ahead in your career. Finding colleagues or clients there and connecting with them on the site is a great way to educate people about who you are and what you do.
LinkedIn even has a function to allow users to answer questions related to their industry, which maximizes your exposure on the site.
You can bring value to the conversation and show your expertise at the same time. Of course, as a member you can also use the job search functions of the site to find direct contacts as well.
Audit your personal Facebook page and delete anything that potential employers might not be impressed with.
You can also adjust your privacy settings so only friends can see your wall. You can’t control what your friends say and do there, but you can limit the people who can see this information.
If you intend to use Facebook to help you land a job, be sure and post more pictures of yourself in business attire than ones with family and friends. Avoid the embarrassment of having business contacts or potential employers finding party pictures you wouldn’t want them to see.
You can also post your thoughts and specific notes on industry issues on Facebook pages, and make them available to the public.
Simply put, Twitter is an untapped goldmine for potential job offers. You can even search for job leads as they’re being tweeted, in real time.
Dashboard programs like TweetDeck make this strategy easier to manage by creating alerts for tweets that match a range of selected keywords you assign.
For example, if you setup an alert for a keyword phrase like “need an assistant manager,” these programs will provide updates from any Twitter accounts that post a tweet matching that specific phrase.
If an employer desperately needs a resource for a specific job, they might make a hiring decision on a “first come, first serve” basis. Apps like TweetDeck can help you be one of the first candidates to receive notice of the job offer.
The internet is no longer just a place to connect with friends, family, and like-minded individuals.
Today, you can post an online resume and showcase your best work-related knowledge on your own blog, as well as search for specific job openings in seconds. More importantly, you can build relationships with the right people wherever you are.
Use the web to maintain a web presence and contribute to a better job search for your financial future.
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