New Networking

Over the past three to four months, I've become very serious about my job search since I will be graduating this May. I've been extremely fortunate to have landed nearly 10 interviews and three job offers (which I had to reluctantly turn down for various reasons) since I began this journey. Because I'm hoping to enter the very competitive sports industry and all of my interviews and offers have come from a sports organization, I've had several of my friends ask me how I made this happen. The answer is two words: social media.

Before I begin going into more depth about my experiences with my personal job search, I do want to offer one disclaimer: I am extremely new to this, obviously. If anyone reading this blog post has any other advice they'd like to share with me and my readers, please do so! I need all of the help I can get!

Now onto social media and the job search... Basically, social media is the new networking tool, and I know that I'm not the only person who believes this after reading the article How Social Media Could Land You Your Next Job by Sam Laird. I've had a LinkedIn since my freshman year of college, but I never paid much attention to it until I was a junior. Young professionals - you should be getting on LinkedIn as much as you get on Facebook. Download the LinkedIn app on your phone just like you did for Facebook and Twitter. And don't only log on and look at job postings; interact and engage with people as well! Ask friends (or "connections") to endorse you, update your status with a great quote or a short story about where you've recently volunteered, congratulate friends on new jobs they've landed, and read and share articles about industries and companies that you're interested in. By reading some of these articles, I learned about a new online community where sports-specific organizations post job openings, which in turn landed me all of my interviews.

The online community I'm referring to is Teamwork Online. Immediately after signing up for it, I received an email notifying me of a sports career fair in Atlanta. This is where I met so many great potential employers and handed out my resume. While this isn't necessarily considered "networking via social media," my resume took care of that. Instead of simply putting the address to my LinkedIn profile at the top of my resume, I put the address to my About Me profile. The reason I did this was because About Me allows you to create a profile that provides links to all of your other social media accounts (or at least the ones you want to appear). I have a link to my LinkedIn, of course, and then various others such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Blogger, etc. This doesn't allow people to see your full profiles on all of these sites, but it does allow them to see your most recent posts. This allows potential employers to get a better idea of who you are as a person. There are millions of other soon-to-be college graduates who studied marketing and/or public relations, held leadership positions in numerous campus organizations, had internship experience, volunteer frequently, etc. In short, there are tons of people who have the same qualifications, knowledge, experience, and expertise as you, so employers want to know how well you will fit into their company. In the sports industry, more importantly, they want to know who you know and if you can be a player in their organization that will benefit the entire team and not hold them back.

This is where social media comes in handy for them. If they decide to click on my Facebook button on my About Me profile, they'll most likely see some of my favorite quotes or read about an experience I had that day that inspired me. If they click on my Twitter button, they're more likely to see some of my witty comments about various stories taking place in the news or cheering on my favorite sports teams. If they click on Foursquare, they're going to see that school takes up the majority of my time right now because I'm always in a building on campus. These are the kind of things that employers want to know in order to figure out if interviewing you is even worth their time.

How do I know that employers actually took my social media accounts into consideration? One of the great things about About Me is that you can see how many people have viewed your profile in the past week, month, year, etc. Unlike LinkedIn, you can't actually see which individuals viewed it though. However, after handing out my resume at the career fair, I saw a huge increase in the amount of views that I'm accustomed to getting on my About Me profile. I had not given out my About Me link to anyone else, so I assume it was from those potential employers.

One important thing that I'd like to point out though, is that these potential employers decided to take additional time to look at my social media accounts. That being said, you have to SELL YOURSELF to them in order for them to even glance at your resume. Whether you're a marketing major or a sociology major, you're going to have to learn how to sell yourself, because you'll have to do it for the rest of your life. You can't just sell yourself in person either. You have to sell yourself in those follow-up emails after you meet someone, the thank you notes you send after your interview, and, of course, your social media accounts.

Happy selling, tweeting, Facebooking, pinning, photographing, checking in, etc.!