Social Media and Job Searches

Are you searching for a new job? Maybe you have already prepared for the interviews and already have the perfect cover letters lined up. There's another thing to prepare for. Social media. Yes, your online presence matters to recruiters. According to Jennifer Spencer's article "3 Ways Companies Are Analyzing Social Media To Make Hiring Decisions" on Entrepreneur, this includes whether you have any online presence at all and whether your activities outside of work violate their values or differ from how you described yourself in your resume and cover letter. These could be indicators of whether you will even make it to the interview part of the process. This could be a potential problem for the 30% of the population who do not have any social media presence. Spencer mentions that "some 47% of prospective employers said that if they couldn't find a job candidate online, that they were less likely to call them in for an interview" (Spencer, 2018). 

Having a presence on social media can be indicative of how willing you are to attach yourself to others in your field. This could mean seeing how apt you are at networking and overall how you present yourself in both professional settings and outside of them. 

So you want to know what exactly they look for in your social media profiles. According to the career advice experts at Glassdoor in their article titled "What Recruiters Look at When Stalking Your Social Media"; hiring managers tend to focus on your photo gallery and your "about me" on your Facebook page. What they are looking for in these sections is supporting evidence to back up how you presented yourself in your application. Proper spelling and grammar. Glassdoor experts say that these are important because it shows that you are thoughtful about how you speak. They would in turn believe they can rely on you to present professional work free of these errors because you seem to be someone who takes these skills seriously. 

As stated by Hallie Crawford, a career coach, “Recruiters like to see if you have any mutual connections and if you are connected with others in your industry,” This shows recruiters what you have avid interests in and how that applies to what they do and also shows them what knowledge you could bring to the table. Having valuable connections can help open up job opportunities and opportunities to learn more and grow every day. 

We talked about what recruiters look for in candidates; now let's look at what might make them say no to your application. In the blog, These social media mistakes can actually disqualify you from a job, Isabel Thottam says that the main turnoffs for recruiters are: being private on your social media, proof of buying fake followers, and inactivity. Being private is a big turnoff for recruiters because they learn that you are a secretive person and they immediately wonder if you have something to hide. Recruiters also have ways of finding out whether you bought followers. It's always best to have a few valuable connections rather than a hundred random followers who you don't know and nor they, you. The last turnoff is inactivity. This is a big turnoff because it takes away any way of learning more about you and your personality. Knowing your presence online really helps with identifying whether your activities align with their morals. 

Online presence is important, but what kind? It is always important to be authentic but also know when to respond to a situation and how. In the book Light, Bright & Polite, Josh Ochs mentions in chapter two that how you respond to negative situations is more indicative of who you are and your values than the situations or comments themselves. Be careful of the use of profanity and avoid anything that could be offensive because people outside of your circle may get a very different view of you from who you might actually be. In an age where everything public is accessible online, how you look online can be more important than your resume. The internet in a way becomes your second resume.