TOPIC 3: Building A Professional Online Profile
Imagine if you were an employer and you are looking for the perfect employee out of hundreds and thousands of candidates, with only a few pages of CV, or maybe a 15 minutes interview for each of them, how well can you get to know them and make sure you have chosen the right one for that job? I think it is impossible!
As social media is becoming more and more popular in this generation, majority of us might already have an online profile built in many ways. Our online profiles present who we are and what we want to be known for. It is essential to manage our own personal brand effectively, to present the best side of us. Having a good personal brand not only improves our employability, but also reputation and publicity.
WHY DO WE NEED A GOOD PROFESSIONAL ONLINE PROFILE?
93% of recruiters use or plan to use social media to support their recruiting efforts! (Jobvite social recruiting survey, August 2014) The survey demonstrated the importance of having a good professional online profile and the needs for establishing one if you haven’t done so. Companies, such as BeMyBest would even offer the service of managing your online presence for you. Here is a short advert by BeMyBest – a fun cartoon demonstrating the needs for establishing a professional online profile.
SO, HOW TO DEVELOP A GOOD PROFESSIONAL PROFILE?
Firstly, the most important point is that you cannot lie about yourself online, in another words, your online profile has to be authentic. It will be really hard to maintain if the information that you used to represent yourself is not true with modern networking society, people will find out! Highlight the personas or characteristics that are best describe you or best related to your desire professional field, to show others the best of you.
Second of all, we should separate our profession and private life online. One way to do so is to use different platforms for these two purposes. For professional work, a profile on LinkedIn should be set up. This is a place where you can publish our digital CV, interests and skills or even your previous works. On the other hand, Facebook or Twitter can be use for your private social life. Although it is difficult to separate these two in reality, having different information about oneself display on different media and platform minimise the risk of showing potential employers ‘too much information’.
Thirdly, other than qualification and references, creativity and your ability to express yourself can be a major consideration for employers too. To show your ability of critical thinking and collaborating with others, participate in discussion broad in LinkedIn is a good way to go. Another way to do so is to blog. By posting your own thoughts and views on certain topics, replying and answering readers’ comments, it demonstrates your ability of organising your thoughts and to work with others. It also shows your passion and enthusiasm about what you are doing. Kristina is a blogger that I have been following for a few years, she shares her paper craft projects on her blogs and she is now a designer for a popular paper crafting company in the US. By sharing her creativity on her blog with others, she demonstrated the skills she has got and it is a good platform to promote herself.
Last but not least, the connection. Simply putting out information about oneself is insufficient. We have to make sure people can reach you and acknowledge about your existence. By interacting with people within that professional field, not only will you have the opportunity to be working with them in the future, but also keep yourself up to date about the trends and insights in that area.
With the combination of promoting yourself on different platforms, it creates an authentic 3-demensional image of a person and compare with the traditional way of handing in CV and having interviews, this is a better way to get a full picture of someone and it is easier for employers to filter potential candidates after they have learnt more about them.
Reference:
Neil’s Recruitment Co. (2014) Curating Your Online Profile. [Online] Available at: http://www.neilsrecruitment.co.uk/2014/01/curating-your-online-profile/ [Accessed: 6th March 2015]
For Dummies. How to Create Effective and Professional Online Profiles. [Online] Available at: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-create-effective-and-professional-online-pr.html [Accessed: 6th March 2015]
BBC News Business. (2013) Using social media to find a new job. [Online] Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24994573 [Accessed: 6th March 2015]
Graham, D. (2013) Your 2013 LinkedIn Checklist to Enhance Your Personal Brand. [Online] Available at: https://dngraham.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/your-2013-linkedin-checklist-to-enhance-your-personal-brand/?goback=%2Egde_3269015_member_201251655 [Accessed: 7th March 2015]
TheEmployable. (2014) How Blogging Can Help You Get A Job. [Online] Available at: http://www.theemployable.com/index.php/2014/10/28/blogging-can-help-get-job/ [Accessed: 7th March 2015]
