Mind your manners

[Badshah Mamun]

Mind your manners

By Kim Kind

Social media can be friend and foe when it comes to recruitment, writes Kim Kind.

Posting pictures of the entertainment at last night's buck's party on your Facebook page probably isn't a great idea if you're looking for a new job. Neither is whining about your current employer or bitching about your colleagues.

It's the not-so-secret dilemma of job-hunting in the social media age. It is highly likely that before an interview, your name will be Googled and what you say and do online, now and forever, can be used against you.

Nick Wailes is an associate professor in work and organisational studies at the University of Sydney and has researched how social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can help or hurt a candidate's career prospects.

In interviews with recruitment professionals, Wailes found "all of them know of instances where people who might otherwise have got a position, had question marks raised about their suitability after [recruiters] had a look at their Facebook pages".

Some human resources managers have also begun monitoring how many recruiters are listed as contacts in their staff's online networks. "They see an increase in the number of recruiters as connections as an indicator that people are searching roles,"

Wailes says. "I suppose the important lesson here is that if you are searching for a role, make sure that your connections can't easily be searched by other people."

Used in the right way, however, social media can help candidates stand out from the crowd.

Wailes tells of a student who liked to "tweet" about her studies. When she was employed as a graduate in a consulting firm, she continued to be active on Twitter and to promote her new organisation. Her manager told Wailes that her ability to promote the firm and how great it was to work there had given her an excellent profile at the very highest levels of management.

Anne Bartlett-Bragg is the managing director of social business consultancy Headshift, and says if you are able to write with authority and intelligence about a topic connected to your profession, tweeting or blogging can attract attention and help build a network.

"Let's say you're really into knowledge management and you want to write about knowledge management," Bartlett-Bragg says.

"That starts to get noticed by other people that do knowledge management. People can find you."

Discussing a blog you've been writing can make a positive impression in an interview and position you as someone proactive. It's a way of differentiating yourself from other candidates. Joining groups in your field of interest on social networking sites can also help build a profile.

"Look at your field of practice. Where do people from that field of practice hang out online?" she says.

"There are lots of online communities. The teachers go to a certain area, marketing people hang out in certain areas. Find out where they are online and start participating in those groups."

Bartlett-Bragg also suggests Googling the names of high-profile people in your industry to see if they are on Twitter or LinkedIn, joining the same groups as them and noting who their friends are. "It's really about getting to know where the people are that you want to work with and joining in their conversations," Bartlett-Bragg says.

Having an informed opinion when engaging on these sites can make you a valuable contributor and promote your personal brand, but making thoughtless rash statements and hitting send too quickly can work against you and hurt your reputation. Remember, inflammatory comments need to be backed up by evidence.

The head of consulting at Futurestep recruitment company, Matt Dale, says professionals must use social media judiciously. "If someone is tweeting or blogging, they want to be deliberate about what they're putting out there, because it's broadcast," he says. "You wouldn't go on mainstream radio and make a comment without thinking about it."

Platforms such as LinkedIn, which has 50 million users, allow us to broadcast our credentials and experience to the world, so it's vital to be measured and accurate about how you represent yourself.

Talking yourself up and embellishing your CV can backfire online just as easily as in real life.

In fact, the absence of non-verbal cues such as body language make it important to be genuine when engaging in social media.

"You wouldn't risk your professional brand by being unauthentic across the table from a potential employer - why would you do it online?" Dale says.

And while social media has changed recruitment in a big way, Dale says it's only one part of a multiple-sourcing strategy that includes advertising, industry bodies, managers' networks and interaction between people.

"It's not the only way, it's one of many ways. It's different because it means people can make networks they wouldn't be able to otherwise," he says. "It's just another way to communicate ... we still need to manage it and be careful."

Source: http://content.mycareer.com.au/advice-research/interview/mind-your-manners.aspx