This week an enthusiastic NBA fan landed his dream job with the aid of a twitter account and some sharp thinking. He noticed that a promotion being run by his favourite team did not have a social media component – so he went ahead and made one.
After a couple of days it was proving so successful in driving fan engagement that the team’s owners asked the fan to hand over the account in return for courtside season tickets. Then they reconsidered – courtside season tickets and a job as social media manager for the team.
Now that’s not a bad return considering the total time expended by the creative fan totalled only a few hours and cost him him nothing financially. And it’s not only social media roles that get filled with the aid of social media activities. It’s all kinds of roles…
Since 89% of employers claim to use social media in their recruitment efforts (up by 6% on last year) it is increasingly essential to have an ’employer-friendly’ social media presence if you’re looking for work.
The there’s the concept of the ‘twesume’ – the 140 character twitter-based resume. There’s a great post over at Mashable giving tips on how to maximise the potential of this idea – something which might only take 10 minutes to do but could be key in finding leads on the kind of jobs that would suit you.
Finally, in this little round-up of social media based job hunting tips and resources, there’s some very handy analytics from Linked-In doing the rounds at the moment which reveal the most over-used words that users describe themselves with on their profiles (in English-speaking countries ‘creative’ came top of the list for example).
This can give you a good idea of how much your profile and CV actually stands out from the crowd (without having to stalk 100 other users to get an impression) and also an idea of what employers are looking for – i.e. what works.
Anyway, I’ll leave it there for now but will return to this subject at regular intervals in the future as it becomes an increasingly prominent manner in which social media is shaping the world of work, even for those who don’t work anywhere near the IT sector. Plus, in these cash-strapped and job-anxious times it’s probably useful to have all the help we can get…
