Archive for Category: Social Media
Some (Career/Workplace) Things I’m Grateful For
Posted in Future of Careers Recommended Resources Social Media on November 25, 2009 at 10:53 am
It’s no secret that 2009 has not been the easiest of years for most college students and young professionals; however, over the past year there have certainly been bright spots. Today, in honor of Thanksgiving, I wanted to share some of the positive trends I’ve noticed this year.
More resources to help students and recent grads. While we’ve lost some bloggers and websites this year, we’ve also welcomed many helpful new resources for young professionals. I’m particularly grateful for the resources I find myself recommending over and over again, such as UrbanInterns.com, LinkedIn’s Grad Guide and Twitter lists (check out my list of career/workplace experts to follow).
University career centers serving more alumni. Resources for more experienced job seekers are growing as well — and some of that growth is coming from college career centers, which traditionally only served students. Almost every career services professional I spoke with this year mentioned the influx of alumni calling for their help. One career director at an Ivy League university told me that, for the first time ever, they’ve added a dedicated staff person to service alumni.
I think this is a great thing: as people face more career changes and job hunts, they need more resources to turn to. While I do suspect that career centers will begin charging their alums (currently the vast majority serve alumni for free), I believe this trend is here to stay. Perhaps in the future university career services will become more of a lifelong resource rather than a one-time stopover. (more…)
Upcoming Teleclass: How To Social Network To Get A Job
Posted in Career Advice Job Hunting Recommended Events Social Media on September 14, 2009 at 11:44 am
You keep hearing about LinkedIn…and Twitter…and Facebook. But can they help you find a mentor, create an online career development network and ultimately find a job? The answer is a resounding: YES!
Please join me on Thursday, October 1 at 8:00pm Eastern for “How To Social Network To Get A Job – A Teleclass”
I will be presenting along with Brian Kurth (Career Transition Guru, Author, TV Contributor and Founder of VocationVacations) and Miriam Salpeter (Blog Author, Speaker, Career Coach and Twitter Expert).
I hope you will join us on Thursday, October 1 at 8:00pm Eastern for this exciting and informative teleclass. The cost is just $19.99.
On CareerTV: Twitter, LinkedIn and Living in Your Parents’ Basement
Posted in Career Advice First Job Out of College Job Hunting Recommended Resources Social Media on August 24, 2009 at 11:47 am
This week I’m launching a new regular video segment with my friends at CareerTV. I’ll be chatting via Skype each week with host Sean O’Grady about timely career issues.
In our first five-minute segment, we’re answering viewer questions about finding jobs on Twitter, connecting professionally on LinkedIn and surviving when you move back home with mom and dad (hint: lay off the frozen yogurt).
Watch the video here.
Have questions you’d like us to address in future CareerTV segments? Please share in the comments section below!
5 Steps to a Fantastic LinkedIn Profile
Posted in Career Advice Job Hunting Social Media on August 9, 2009 at 5:34 pm
As a Campus Spokesperson for LinkedIn, I am currently in the midst of facilitating a series of training webinars for college career services professionals (sign up here if you haven’t already — they are free!). I recently wrote a blog post for CollegeRecruiter.com advising career services professionals how to improve their LinkedIn profiles. Today I’ve adapted those tips for job seekers and young professionals:
As the largest and most vibrant professional social network, LinkedIn provides a wealth of opportunities for job seekers and ambitious young professionals. But LinkedIn doesn’t work unless you work it.
How can you make the most of LinkedIn? Here are some tips for creating a profile that will impress employers, colleagues, headhunters, professional association members and more:
1. Include keywords in your summary statement. The Summary portion of your profile provides a chance to share the highlights of your bio in your own words. It’s also a place to include key words and phrases that a recruiter or hiring manager might type into a search engine to find a person like you. The best place to find relevant keywords is in the job listings that appeal to you and the LinkedIn profiles of people who currently hold the kinds of positions you want. Check out LinkedIn’s Company Pages feature to search through the profiles of employees at your dream employers. And remember, it is absolutely fine — crucial, in fact — to include unpaid or volunteer work in your Summary. If you are a current student or recent grad, you can include relevant coursework and extra curricular achievements as well.
2. Write for the screen. LinkedIn, or any website for that matter, is not the place for long-form prose. Present your summary statement in short blocks of text with lots of white space. Bullet points are great, too.
3. List all experience. One of the most valuable aspects of LinkedIn is the way it connects you with former colleagues and classmates—which, as we all know, are some of our best networking contacts. It would be a shame if a long lost former colleague or classmate, who happens to be a recruiter now, couldn’t find you because you hadn’t listed that shared employment in your LinkedIn profile.
4. Collect diverse recommendations. Nothing builds credibility like third party endorsements. The most impressive LinkedIn profiles have at least one recommendation associated with each job a person has held. Think about soliciting recommendations from professors, internship coordinators and colleagues, employers, classmates with whom you shared an extra curricular activity and professional mentors.
5. Share your news frequently. The best way to stay on other people’s radar screens is to update your status on LinkedIn (the box near the top of your profile) at least once a week. Tell people about events you are attending, major projects you’ve completed, professional books you are reading, successes you are celebrating or any other news that you would tell someone at a networking reception or on a quick catch-up phone call.
Want to become a more active user of LinkedIn? Check out the LinkedIn Learning Center and, for students, the LinkedIn Grads Guide. I also recommend Guy Kawasaki’s LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover.
Podcast Interview with TheUniversitySpace.com: “Smart Social Media for Recruiting”
Posted in Generation Y Recruiting Social Media on July 20, 2009 at 12:20 am
Many thanks to Ray Ferreira at TheUniversitySpace.com for interviewing me on the topic of “Smart Social Media for Recruiting.”
Here is an introduction to our conversation:
Online social networks create a whole new media paradigm through which to reach today’s graduating talent. The rapid pace of this shift, and a new world of social etiquette, has left many corporate university recruiters off on the sidelines.
In this podcast we’re joined by author, speaker, and Gen-Y expert Lindsey Pollak, as we begin to frame out an approach to social media practices that can serve recruiters in the university space.
Listen here and please join the conversation at TheUniversitySpace.com!
Tags: TheUniversitySpace.com
On the LinkedIn “Seek Week” Blog: Stop job hunting like it’s 1999!
Posted in Career Advice First Job Out of College Generation Y Recommended Resources Social Media on April 23, 2009 at 11:19 am
Thank you to the team at LinkedIn for inviting me to write a guest post for the LinkedIn Blog’s “Seek Week,” which is dedicated to helping ‘09 grads find jobs.
LinkedIn has also launched a great resource for graduating seniors (and all college students and recent grads), the ‘09 Grad Guide and a discussion group featuring helpful articles, job postings and Q&As.
Here is an excerpt from my guest article, “Stop Job Hunting Like It’s 1999: Dos and Don’ts for ‘09 Grads”:
Job hunting is a journey, so I’d like to begin this post by paraphrasing from my favorite movie about a journey: The Wizard of Oz: We’re not in the 20th Century anymore, Toto.
This is the sentence I find myself thinking whenever a college student says something like, “I’ve sent out, like, a hundred resumes and I still haven’t found a job!” Emailing out resumes and waiting for a response used to be a perfectly decent strategy for finding a job. Not anymore. Today’s job seekers, especially ‘09 grads job hunting in a recession, need to be more creative, more proactive and more tech savvy than ever before. We are blessed to live in a time when there are so many new job hunting tools and techniques. Take advantage!
Here are some tips: Click here to read the rest of this article on the LinkedIn Blog…
Tags: college graduation, Job Hunting, LinkedIn
Personal Branding and Your Job Search: An Interview with Dan Schawbel
Posted in Career Advice Generation Y Recommended Resources Social Media on April 7, 2009 at 8:26 am
As the job market becomes more and more competitive, students and recent grads need to do everything they can to stand out from their peers. One great way to do this is by building your professional reputation, also known as your “personal brand.”
For advice on creating your personal brand – and using it to help you land a great job – I turned to Dan Schawbel, the leading personal branding expert for Generation Y. Dan is the author of the brand new book, Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success (Kaplan, April 09), as well as the publisher of the Personal Branding Blog and Personal Branding Magazine.
I recently had the opportunity to interview Dan. Note that I’ve posted excerpts of this interview on other blogs, but the full text of our interview is only available here:
Lindsey: How do you define personal branding?
Dan: Personal branding is the process by which we market ourselves to other people. The process that I’ve developed in my new book, Me 2.0, is “discover, create, communicate and maintain (DCCM).”
The first step in this process is to discover what you’re passionate about and your area of expertise, while establishing goals and forming both a development plan and a personal marketing plan.
The second step is to create marketing materials, which could include a business card, portfolio, website, blog, social network profiles, a podcast, a video resume, as well as traditional documents like a resume and cover letter.
The third step is to become your own personal PR person and communicate your brand to others through speaking engagements, commenting on blogs, writing for magazines, pitching journalists and more.
The final step is to maintain your brand, which consists of online reputation management and keeping your profiles up-to-date and accurate with changes in your career.
Lindsey: You are in your 20s. How have you established yourself as a personal branding expert at such a young age? (more…)
Tags: Dan Scawbel, Me 2.0, Personal Branding, Twitter
My interview on the Personal Branding Blog
Posted in Career Advice Job Hunting Networking Recommended Resources Social Media on February 25, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Many thanks to Dan Schawbel for interviewing me on his Personal Branding Blog.
Here is an excerpt:
Dan: When you go to speak to students across the country, how have you accessed their proficiency in job searching and resume building through online means? Most students I talk to don’t know what LinkedIn is. What are your experiences?
Lindsey: A year or so ago, very few students I met had even heard of LinkedIn. Today, I’d say about 1/4 of students at my workshops are aware of the site, but most don’t really know how to make the most of it. I believe that an active presence on LinkedIn is no longer optional for a career-minded person of any age, so I talk about it in every speech and workshop I give.
1. First, I advise students (and everyone else!) to set up a complete profile including keywords a recruiter or business owner might use to find someone with your skills and interests.
2. Then I recommend joining groups on LinkedIn (such as the Personal Branding group, of course) to build connections and become part of conversations about industry news.
3. Third, I recommend customizing those little “I’d like to add you as a connection” messages – that’s a great way to stand out and show that you are someone who takes the time to personalize your communications.
Another important tip, particularly for those who are just starting out in the workforce, is to scour other people’s LinkedIn profiles to look for companies you may want to apply to, job titles or professions you didn’t know about, professional organizations where you might network and people with similar interests who might be willing to offer some job search advice. If you’re trying to build your own personal brand, LinkedIn is incredibly valuable as a massive database of other people’s personal brands and career paths to research.
How to get free career advice from 50 top career advisers
Posted in Career Advice Job Hunting Networking Recommended Resources Social Media on February 4, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Could that headline possibly be overselling the content of this blog post?
Nope.
There is an easy, free — and fun — way to get free career advice (and much more) from some of the best career advisers in the country. It’s all happening on Twitter.
Willy Franzen, of One Day, One Job and Found Your Career, has put together an excellent list of “50 Twitter Users to Follow for Your Job Search.” I’m honored to be on the list and happy to see many of my favorite career bloggers, authors and speakers on the list as well. (If you’d like to follow me — and please do! — I’m @lindseypollak.)
All of the people on this list use their Twitter feeds to share career advice articles, job search tips, real job and internship opportunities, event announcements and much more. If you’re not on Twitter, you’re missing out on a tremendous amount of free and valuable information. (Yes, you’re also missing out on silly photos, descriptions of what people are eating for lunch and a fair amount of procrastination, but it’s easy to find the valuable content on Twitter. The rest makes it really fun.)
I’d also like to add a few additional Twitterers that I recommend, although I’m sure I’m forgetting a bunch — will add in the comments when I remember.
Alexandra Levit (@alevit) – blogger and author of How’d You Score that Gig and The Don’t Teach Corporate in College
Chandlee Bryan (@chandlee) – career coach, resume writer and blogger
Diane K. Danielson (@DowntownWoman) – CEO of the Downtown Women’s Club and blogger at The Women’s Dish
Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki) – one of the most popular Tweeters, who often posts links to articles on making the best use of Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media
Please share your favorite career-related tweeters in the Comments section below, and be sure to check out Willy Franzen’s list — you won’t regret it!
Tags: Career Advice, employment, jobs, Twitter
Find your dream job: 12 career resolutions for 2009
Posted in Career Advice First Job Out of College Generation Y Job Hunting Social Media on December 28, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Reminder: I’m now answering job search and career questions as Career Contributor for ABC News on Campus. Submit your question here.
Every day is a new beginning, but a new calendar year offers a particularly great opportunity for fresh starts. This year more than ever, career-minded people are craving new opportunities and new strategies to carry out in January and beyond.
As you think about your plans and goals for 2009, here are 12 career-related resolutions to consider adding to your list.
1. I will do one thing every day to find a job or advance my career. Spend some time every day, even just five minutes, researching potential employers, reading advice articles, following up with people you’ve met, practicing for interviews or doing anything else to help your career prospects. Keep moving forward. Momentum matters.
2. I will update my resume once a month. Especially in an economic downturn, your resume needs to be ready to send at a moment’s notice. Make a note in your calendar to review this important document once a month to be sure it sells your skills and experience in the best possible way.
3. I will regularly review my online presence. While you’re keeping your resume up-to-date, review your online professional presence as well. Google your own name and make sure the results reflect the image you want to project. Many organizations are now relying on social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook for recruiting, so it’s quite likely your next employer will review your online profile before seeing your official resume.
