Q. You’ve written about Twitter and using social media to help land job searches. I’m 30-something and am back in the job market, but I have only just signed up for Twitter so I admit to be clueless. Can you suggest an online class or computer program that I can buy to help navigate this new world? -DP
A. Save your money. There is a cornucopia of free information regarding use of social media. One of the most helpful social media primers comes from Scott Kleinberg. Scott’s Red Eye Chicago social media columns are entertaining and loaded with solid information. In last week’s column — The A-B-Cs of Social Media, Scott provides 26 tips and five helpful links, including Mashable.com, an important tool for social media newbies and veterans.
Since you are just starting out, you’ll want to click on Michael Hyatt’s Beginner’s Guide to Twitter. It’s a 20-minute basic training start-up course for “non techies.” This guide will walk you through every step in setting up and using Twitter. Twitter also provides its own 101 guide for beginners. One of my earlier posts linked to 100 tools for more effective use of Twitter and social media.
Also, be sure to follow Heather Huhman, the Energizer bunny of online PR job tweets. Heather daily shares dozens of job leads and PR-related links.
Finally, you might want to read “Need a Job? Show Them You Can Twitter” in Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle.
Culpwrit readers: Help out with any other tools you have found helpful. Also let us know if you landed a job through social media, and how you did it.
You may also want to check out twitterjobsearch.com it has more than 200 thousand jobs all from tweets.
Twitter is a great resource for finding a job and you have listed many great resouces and tools. I recently taught a seminar “Ditch Your Resume” and I showed job seekers how to create a powerful digital footprint with LinkedIn and a personal blog and then use twitter to send people to their profile on LinkedIn and to blog posts about their skillsets, projects and recommendations.
I also tweet jobs for a healthcare company who was listed in the top 50 companies using Twitter to Recruit.( http://budurl.com/emptwit ) We have successfully recruited several corporate employees using twitter. I would recommend doing a daily twitter search using #jobs. Use a tool like tweetlater to send the search results to your email.
Good luck and Be Patient!!
As well as Twitter Job Search, mentioned in a previous comment, there’s also http://www.twitterjobfinder.com – where you can search Twittered jobs by location and job type.
Good Luck to all!