College Students Should Be Using Social Media as an Essential Part of Their Job Search

With the unemployment rate hovering around 8%, 2009 college graduates are facing one of the most difficult job markets in our country’s history. According to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), employers plan to increase their college hiring by just 1.3 percent this year over 2008, the weakest outlook in six years.
As a University Professor I have sadly noticed a huge increase in the number of students seeking my help to find work after graduation. I have also been contacted frequently from ex-students who have been laid off from their first job out of college. Many students are now asking for my assistance in both resume consultation and alternative job seeking methods. Students should consider using social media as part of their job search strategy. Many people are familiar with social media sites such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook for having fun with friends and family. These can also be used to conduct a very successful job search.
Let’s first look at Twitter. Twitter is a social media website that allows you to follow/be followed by individuals who have the same interests as you. By cultivating your own network on Twitter of people who work in the same industry, it allows you to keep a pulse on what is happening within your area of expertise. It allows you to network with people and utilize excellent word of mouth to job search. Don’t be afraid to “Tweet” that you are looking for a job and what your experience is within the industry. Tweets get noticed and garner responses.
Twitter is also overflowing with recruiters nowadays. You can follow recruiters and search job postings. Many of the most followed Twitterers have links to their blogs where they are now posting premium job listings. One example would be follow @smheadhunter on Twitter. You can also search recruiter, headhunter, job posts, industries for more jobs and also join TweetMyJobs.com. This website offers new job postings sent directly to you via Twitter.
College students should also be subscribing to blogs that have job listings. I have found many of these excellent blogs via Twitter. One of my absolute favorites is Guy Kawasaki’s blog How to Change the World. His blog has a section where he offers an excellent list of job opportunities (http://jobs.guykawasaki.com/a/jbb/find-jobs).
LinkedIn is another great tool to use to look for employment as it can replace the traditional networking events. LinkedIn allows you to set up a professional looking resume and online recommendation/reference section. I suggest to students to target specific companies and then try and reach out and make a connection to a current employee. LinkedIn can allow you to gain introductions to others this way and perhaps find an internship or garner an informational interview.
Facebook is very popular with college students because it allows them to socialize with their friends and family. They also should be using Facebook to position themselves as a viable candidate for their industry. I have written blogs before about how college students should be creating a personal brand. They need to differentiate themselves from the competition. If students have relevant blogs, they should be linking them to their FB account. They should use FB to advertise their talents and make sure that their FB friends are aware of their job search. Facebook Chat is another great way of meeting and networking with your friends. Use it to start conversations or garner advice for your job source.
Another way to utilize the internet to improve your job search is by the use of Yahoo Pipes. On John Barker’s blog InspiredMind (www.d3sync.com/blog), he explains how to “Take the Job out of Job Search”. Barker uses Yahoo Pipes to combine, sort and massage data from a number of different websites. Barker gives a great example of how to search for a job in his industry. “The search I created pulled a feed from three sources: Dice, Craigslist, and jobs.zend.com and then searched for keywords [LAMP, PHP, SQL, DB, Python, RoR, Ruby, Rails, Apache, Programmer] in the city of San Francisco, CA. This allows me to easily sort through and identify from a list of jobs that pertain to only what really applies to my line of work and location.”
Just an end note: I met John Barker through a social media website called BrightKite. I posted on the site about the idea for this article. Within one hour he had offered his expertise by providing me with this entry on his blog. Just an example of how quick, supportive and relevant it is to be using social media sites…especially if you are in the market for a job. College students can’t afford not to be using social media as an integral part of their job hunt strategy.