I’m impressed! These gentlemen continue to post nice and brief video segments about living as a modern professional on the Internet, and I’ve yet to disagree with a single thing they’ve said. Good work, and please keep it up.
You need a new job. Maybe you’ve got one and are looking to switch, maybe you don’t. Either way, you might not be aware that the job hunting world has changed.
Your career probably revolves around IT, even if you’re not an IT person. If you struggle with your personal IT, then put the time in now and learn it. It is always a differentiator, and it’s probably a big one.
LinkedIn is probably the most important task to set for yourself, if you do nothing else, follow this part.
Sign up, create a complete profile. It’s very much like a terse version of your resume or CV.
Connect with everyone you know, especially people from past positions you’ve held.
If you’ve made some connections via social networking, ask to connect with them as well.
Keep working with your profile until LinkedIn says you’re at 100%. That include recommending people you have connected with.
Recommendations in LinkedIn are kind of a scam. I would never use them as a trust metric. The problem is that in a lot of organizations you can see the “recommend me” peer pressure sweep through a whole organization. If you were to watch LinkedIn every day, you can see it roll right through departments, it’s creepy.
That’s why I suggest only recommending people you no longer work with. Start with ancient history and work your way forward. When it comes right down to it, you probably only want recommendations from the people you most respect because that is the real intent, to build a web of trust.
Jobless or not, it is important here (as on your resume) to show that your skills are current and you are actively doing something. You don’t have to be incorporated or anything that requires a big investment, but you should clearly look like you are not sitting on your hands and that you are available to work.
Next, be ready for the job search once you’ve pulled the trigger and started applying. You can expect the following things from everyone your resume reaches:
You are going to get googled. If someone out there with your name is making your search results look scary, put it in your resume and in your cover letter. “I am not the Chris Horn who made headlines in 2008.”
You are going to get stalked on Myspace. Delete your myspace account, it is lame and not the sort of thing highly skilled professionals have. If you are tempted to argue with me on this one I understand, it’s just too damn bad.
You are going to get stalked on Facebook. Make 120% certain you have all of your Privacy settings locked down so that only people in your best friends forever list can see what you have posted. Facebook privacyFacebook friends list
If you have been social networking on twitter, digg, reddit, etc… make sure it doesn’t make you look like a jerk, like me. @chorn
If you are not currently social/professional networking at all, it is time to start. You don’t have to look like you are the foremost authority in your field, but you should at least look like you are paying attention. If people can see that you are involved in your field, it is a big differentiator.
If there is any other ugly content from you or about you on the Internet, you’d better have your talking points ready now because it’s probably there for good.
Build a presence on the Internet. You don’t have to be social networking whiz, but you really can’t afford to avoid it. Your goal in social networking is to find a balance between fame and reputation. You can work your way to having thosands of followers in all of the major networks, but if they don’t know what you are good at, and that you are looking to get paid to do it, you aren’t really helping yourself.
Here is how I would get myself on the Internet:
Get a domain name. For me, chorn.com is great, scrapbooking-for-life.com would probably not be a good choice. That’s probably because scrapbooking in general sounds like kryptonite to me, some other cool sounding hobby might be ok.
Use GoDaddy as your registrar and for DNS, not for hosting your e-mail or website.
Use Google Apps for your domain for e-mail. They have good directions on how to set it up with GoDaddy. If you can afford the $50/year for the premium level, it’s worth it for the added support and features. E-mail addresses like resume@{my_domain_name_goes_here}.com look professional.
Use Tumblr to host your main webpage. They’ll host the A record for your domain for free. That piece is important!
Tumbr is also a great place for you to start blogging, vlogging and aggregating the rest of your social networking related activity that makes you look like an Internet professional.
In addition to Tumblr, Google Apps for your domain includes some free web page hosting with the Sites feature. Not only should you have your resume here as a PDF, but you should put it up as HTML too. If you don’t know what a PDF or HTML is, learn now. Then you can share your resume as something like http://resume.{my_domain_name_goes_here}.com, which is a really nice touch.
Don’t forget the standards you probably already know:
Have a polished resume. Experienced and skilled people do not have a 2 page resume.
Tell everyone that you are looking for a job and what you are looking for. If you are just pushing your resume around you are just a list of buzz words and a price.
Hopefully your area has a professional networking group or two you can attend and meet potential employeers at.
You can work with placement agencies, but your success there is primarily driven by the number of openings and which buzz words they match up on your resume.
The job market is pretty grim right now. Depending on your skill set it might always be grim if you’re choosey, I don’t know. I do know some top notch people who are without a paycheck right now, and looking for some ways to outshine the rest of the pack. Hopefully this helps, but then again maybe it’s just worth $.02.
