“Okay, I may get on board with LinkedIn, but what does Facebook have to do with anything here?” You can ask this question but don’t jump in conclusions before you hear this:
Today, 87 percent of recruiters are using LinkedIn for finding candidates and 55 percent are using Facebook.
These data provided by the Recruiter Nation Survey 2015 effectively illustrate the point. Are you on board now? If yes, let’s get to job hunting on social media! Given that you already have your resume ready, we will discuss the ways to attract recruiters to your social media profiles and let them do their job.
1. Social Media SEO
This one is pretty easy to explain: your profile won’t be seen by anyone if you’re not showed in the search results. With this in mind, you should provide the information about your expertise in the required fields in order to be found; specifically, you should include the keywords that the recruiters will use to locate your profile. These keywords often include competencies and positions. For example, if you are a writer who needs to attract recruiters from professional writing services, some suitable keywords for your profile might be: “professional writer,” “essay writing,” “academic writing.”
Also, do not forget about endorsements when you use LinkedIn. These are the core competencies that the head hunters will use as well. In the case of Facebook, following some professional groups and communities may play the same role.
2. Have a Photo of Yourself
Social media profile is the visual representation of your resume, so it should have your photo. According to LinkedIn, the profiles with photos receive 14 times more views than those without, so uploading a good photo is critical. It can play two roles for you: first, it allows your page to stand out in the search results, so you can get noticed. Second, the photo demonstrates the recruiters that the profile is a good option to get in touch with you. It would be unreasonable to expect that someone uses the profile often if they did not even upload a photo, agree?
Just make sure that your photo does not show you as a “partying” kind of person because the recruiters look on them carefully, so the pics of you from last weekend’s gathering won’t work.
3. Ask your connections to recommend you
This function works for LinkedIn only and it is a powerful one. If you have already asked someone to recommend you, the process of doing this is familiar for you, so keep asking for some more. But if you haven’t, go to the profile view, point the mouse over “View Profile As” button and you will see “As to be recommended” appearing as one of the options. Click on that, and the system will give you several prompts to complete the process.
Recommendations can indeed be effective in helping you to be noticed by recruiters because they mean that your skills have been recognized by others.
4. Don’t become a spammer with LinkedIn recommendations
There is something you need to know before asking people for recommendations: all of them are date-stamped, so if you send a whole bunch of them on one day, the recruiters will notice that easily. Obviously, the same date on many recommendations is not an organic way to convince the recruiters to message you. So build your reputation gradually.
5. Share, share, share
Sharing content is not only caring but a very good way for you to attract head hunters. Your profile, whether at LinkedIn or Facebook, will have much lower chances to get noticed if you do not share anything at all (in this case, the recruiters might be unsure if social media is a right way to contact you because you’re not active there). However, if you share the content that is directly relevant to your working area, say, posts about marketing events, training opportunities, webinars, and articles from well-known marketing professionals, the recruiters will see that you are actively involved in the field.
There are many tools that can help you to find content that will keep you relevant on social media, so you can even automate this process. In other words, stay active and updated!
The Bottom Line
Social media platforms have transformed the way people look for work nowadays because online profiles have become another type of resume. If you are taking advantage of LinkedIn and Facebook in this area as well, use the tips above to attract more recruiters to your profile: they will help you to get hired faster and enjoy social media at the same time.
Tom Jager is professional blogger. He works at A-writer. He has degree in Law and English literature. Tom has written numerous articles/online journals. You can reach him at G+ or Facebook.
