Why and how to create an authentic online professional profile.
Looking for a job can be tough and at the same time looking for a good employee could be more difficult. Most employers will not just throw open their doors to every graduate with a degree, they will want to know a lot of information about the applicant, with both their professional skills as well as their personal features. This makes the use of professional profiles on the web a crucial component to a job seekers arsenal.
Business cards – a scene from 2000 film American Psycho
Just like business cards from the film clip above rather comically portrayed, making little design changes can help hugely in a competitive business. So if you had the ability to express your skills in a unique and personal way, then wouldn’t you?
There are many sites and places on the web that you could use to spread some much needed personal information and information on the persons skills across to a professional business. The most widely used and known is the site LinkedIn. It has contributed to 79% of candidate recruitment through social media (Jobvite, 2014) so creating a profile and updating it as you progress can open up some great opportunities.
Blogging is also a great way of demonstrating some key highly demanded skills. As a blog on The Employable explains, making a blog and help to show the creators passion, creativity, motivation to keep with something and helps tell you apart from everyone else.
However, if used incorrectly your online presence can be a hindrance and may even lead to some serious problems. There have been many incidents where people have unwittingly spread something around on the web that has caused major backlashes to them. Like the “@Justine-Sacco” twitter trend, where a few tweets had spread to thousands and changed her image greatly. There is also the story of the girl that lost her job before even starting because of a single tweet that was not thought through.
To conclude, there are many ways in which a professional online profile can help in the search for a job. Along with the ways, there are also a lot of tools out there to use with most of them giving the user a unique look from others. However, if you were to create a professional profile, you would need to keep it professional. So in the words of Warren Buffett, “it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it”.
References
Alan White (2015) This Teen Says She Got Fired From Her Job Over A Tweet Before She’d Even Started, Available at: http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/how-you-gonna-get-fired-on-your-day-off (Accessed: 7th March 2015).
Jobvite (2014) Social Recruiting Survey, Available at: https://www.jobvite.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Jobvite_SocialRecruiting_Survey2014.pdf (Accessed: 7th March 2015).
JON RONSON (2015) How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life, Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html?_r=1 (Accessed: 7th March 2015).
TheEmployable (2014) How blogging can help you get a job, Available at:http://www.theemployable.com/index.php/2014/10/28/blogging-can-help-get-job/(Accessed: 7th March 2015).
