"Since the number of recruiters and hiring managers using Twitter to find candidates has been growing rapidly over this past year, you'll want to widen your online footprint to include Twitter and take advantage of this wide audience."
Good Morning Folks,
You can’t deny it. Job seekers and recruiters have a love affair with Twitter.
With Twitter becoming perhaps the fastest-growing social network on the planet, job seekers and employers have been turning to this resource. To get seen by these eyes, you need an effective method to write a Twitter resume.
But a resume in only 140 characters? Well, not quite, but Joe Turner put together this step-by-step guide to understanding Twitter’s language so that you can get your name out there.
The challenge lies in making your Twitter resume:
- Succinct
- Easy to find
And, fortunately, it’s easy to do. Two easy tools have surfaced to make these two challenges, less challenging. To make your resume succinct, there are link-shortening applications (like is.GD or GOO.GL) so your links don’t take up your entire character count. And to make your resume easy to find, Twitter has a great feature called “hashtags” that make the word tandem to it searchable.
Recruiters constantly use hashtags to locate potential candidates by searching words like "resume," certain skill sets, locations and so forth. As a result, you want to incorporate a few of these keywords as hashtags on your Twitter resume so you'll be found when recruiters perform their searches. Some good examples of hashtags to include on your Twitter resume include #needajob, #laidoff and #jobangels, among others. A good resource for looking up hashtags is to check out hashtags.org.
Now that you’ve got the basics, here are four major elements you should incorporate into your Twitter resume:
1. Desired job title
2. Desired location
3. Keywords with hashtags
4. Link to resume, personal homepage or your social-networking profile page, such as LinkedIn.
Once we put it all together, here is a good example of what a Twitter resume looks like and how a recruiter would decode it:
Example
RT #Donna Molinari seeks a LEAD/SR QA ENG JOB http://bit.ly/1ThaW @teTalentNetwork -
http://bit.ly/QB5DC @TweetMyResume #resume #QA-Jobs-CA
Decoding
- The RT stands for retweet, which encourages your Twitter followers to retweet, or repeat, this to their followers
- Hashtag with your name makes you to easy to find
- Desired job title
- The first link is the Talent Network profile page leading to her online resume.
- The second link is the job seeker profile that was previously established on TweetMyJobs.com
- The hashtags are the search terms used, in this case, the name, quality assurance jobs in California and the encompassing term "resume."
Now what?
Once you have your online profile and your Twitter resume set up, you'll want to use them to market yourself to the Twitter community. According to John Walker, there are a number of approaches you can use. Co-founder of Talent Evolution, John is a recruiter and career coach who first recommends that you send this tweet to all your followers so they can retweet. Walker recommends following people who can help you in your job search. This list could include recruiters, job sites and potential hiring managers with companies for which you'd like to work.
Walker also suggests making a secondary posting to your Facebook and Twitter profiles.
Remember, the lifespan of a tweet is short, so retweet your resume periodically, but no more than once a week or every few days at the most.
Can you get results from Twitter? Even though it's a bit early in the Twitter job search game, Walker is aware of at least one recruiter who has made six recent placements as a result of finding good candidates solely on Twitter.
Summary
While Twitter shouldn't constitute your entire job-search strategy, you'll most definitely want to incorporate this approach into your current set of tools. Since the number of recruiters and hiring managers using Twitter to find candidates has been growing rapidly over this past year, you'll want to widen your online footprint to include Twitter and take advantage of this wide audience.
And if you'd like to talk to us about career opportunities, we're hiring! Start here.
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A former recruiter, Joe Turner spent 15 years finding and placing top candidates in some of the best jobs of their careers. The author of "Job Search Secrets Unlocked" and "Paycheck 911," Joe also hosts his weekly "Job Search Guy Radio Show" on JobRadio.fm as well as other locations.
