6 TECH JOBS ®


www.siliconrepublic.com/careers-centrewww.siliconrepu CAREERS CENTRECARE SOCIAL MEDIA Creating


your own online brand


Anyone applying for a job these days needs to look beyond the traditional CV to using social media to help build a personal online brand, writes SORCHA CORCORAN


D


eclan Fitzgerald, linkedIn’s inter- national recruitment manager and author of the recruitment blog ‘The Irish cyber Sleuth’ maintains that when applying for a job there is now a new way to give yourself every possible


chance of having your cV reviewed. He calls it “rebooting” your cV, or using social


media to transform your application beyond the clas- sical cV, to create an online identity or a personal online employment brand. This allows a prospective employer to get a lot more flavour about who is applying for their job, according to Fitzgerald. Your first port of call should be linkedIn, he says. “Growing by a user every second and having recently broken the 100-million user mark, millions of profes- sionals all over the world are ‘rebooting’ their cV and branding themselves online by placing their cV on the world’s biggest professional network. “They are then breathing life into their profile by showing how many professional connections they have, adding in Google presentation apps to show previous work they have done, placing in their Twit- ter feed and also their blog, if they have one, and then adding in recommendations to their profile.” currently hiring 100 new employees in Ireland


itself, linkedIn recently launched a new service called ‘Skills’ that can better demonstrate to potential employers the skill sets you feel you have. “This information is important data for any profile


as it gets indexed in linkedIn’s ecosystem and may register on one of their ‘skills pages’, which could be an easier way for jobseekers to be noticed by proac- tive recruiters,” Fitzgerald explains. It’s important to understand that some of the most successful companies in the world are now proac- tively sourcing candidates using internet technolo- gies, he advises. “They no longer rely solely on reactive tactics, hop-


ing that candidates will come their way. They are pro- actively setting up internal sourcing teams with very well-trained recruiters who understand how to mine information on linkedIn to find candidates. “This is an important shift in how recruitment


teams recruit. They now spend huge amounts of time searching for online identities. These teams are con- tinually becoming more skilled in how to interact with candidates in linkedIn groups and Twitter feeds, as well as interacting with candidates using blogs.”


Dynamic content and talent communities In Fitzgerald’s view, being a recruiter in a modern and progressive recruitment department means un- derstanding how to harness the power of the web and


all its social media components to proactively source candidates and develop a powerful, interactive, real- time employment brand with dynamic content and talent communities thriving in the talent economy we exist in. “If recruiters are deploying new tactics to find new candidates, shouldn’t jobseekers be doing the same to grab the attention of these recruiters?” he asks. “By setting up your linkedIn profile, and following


the linkedIn company’s page of an organisation you want to join, you may just hear about your dream job before it even gets published on a company’s career site.


“By joining linkedIn you may be able to find that


hiring manager or recruiter for that job you really want and by sending them a personalised InMail you may just catch their attention and get that interview opportunity you may never have got if you had only applied for a job using your traditional cV,” Fitzger- ald adds.


Tech companies assess poTenTial hires on Facebook


According to an international survey, more than one-third (38pc) of technology companies check out the online pro- files of potential employees on social media sites such as Facebook to determine their suitability.


The survey of 660 senior-level executives in technology companies, including 5pc from Ireland, was carried out by Eurocom Worldwide, the global PR network, in asso- ciation with Irish agency Simpson Financial & Technol- ogy (FT) PR.


“Jobseekers may be happy for their LinkedIn profile to be viewed by a prospective employer, but are they comfort- able with what’s posted on their Facebook profile?” asked Ronnie Simpson of Simpson FT PR.


“They may be comfortable that their own privacy settings are locked down tight, but what about the career suitabil- ity and accessibility of photos or other personal informa- tion posted on friends’ sites?”


He added: “Social media is a great way to network and build career opportunities, but it is becoming more diffi- cult to differentiate between your professional and per- sonal persona on the web.”


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