Advertising & Marketing Agency · St. Louis, MO · MediaCross, Inc.

Finding a Job with Facebook

Emily Hartman lost her job on Thursday afternoon. By the following Monday morning she had several leads and is hoping to have a new job soon. As the national unemployment rate nears 10%, and the typical job search lasts 12 weeks, how did this St. Louis-based account executive have so much early success? Online social networking.

The old rules of posting résumés on CareerBuilder, emailing former colleagues and browsing company websites for openings are still important — even essential.  But there are new rules to add to the job hunt. These days, if you’re serious about being hired, you’ll need to put your computer and PDA to work. That means getting your word out on social sites like Facebook, sending instant job-search updates via messaging feeds like Twitter, and meeting new people who might be able to provide introductions and recommendations through organizations such as LinkedIn.

It pays to network.

For all our technology, the best way to land a job is still through referral. MediaCross’s recruitment marketing statistics indicate that around 25% of new hires come from referrals. Job boards, by comparison, provide about 10% of new hires; the rest come from field recruitment outreach, recruitment websites, and other tactics. The difference today is that a lot more of those jobs start with connections made through online networks. A recent report by market researcher Nielsen found that people now spend more time using social networking sites than they do personal e-mail.

Classic strategies still apply.

Persistence, self-branding, professional presentation — the things a career coach would have steered you toward two decades ago — are still necessary. Social networks alone won’t get you a new gig. But as Emily Hartman’s job search makes clear, they can go a long way to help. Here’s how she’s doing it:

Have a strategy. Then execute.

With a mortgage, a dog and a wedding on the horizon, Hartman knows she has to get a new job quickly. She found herself unemployed at 2 in the afternoon; by 6 that evening she was networking with industry fellows at an annual party. The next day, she started calling relatives and friends and using social media. ”I’d been using Facebook to keep up with friends, but very rarely using Twitter and LinkedIn,” says Hartman. “I knew my fiancee was big into the Twitter scene. He immediately began blasting information out to contacts he had, then sending responses back my way.”

She worked with him further to design and print new business cards. As mobility was a strong concern for Hartman, she incorporated a QR code (the black and white bar-code-like graphic at left) to quickly pass along her VCard information to the mobile device of any user equipped to read the code. This not only allowed her to distribute her contact information more efficiently, the QR code also gave her a really nice talking point throughout the night.

Over the weekend, Hartman updated all of her online profiles. She uploaded a fresh résumé to LinkedIn, the professionals’ networking site, and sent out a message to all 200 of her Facebook and LinkedIn friends, letting them know she was looking for work.

One of them, a former colleague who now owns her own company, called Hartman within the hour, scheduled a lunch for the following Monday and told her about two promising leads. “Here I was 48 hours into being unemployed and I already had some interesting opportunities,” she recalls. “I was like, Wow, this is going to be impressive.”

Keep everyone in the loop.

Over the course of the next few days, Hartman kept a list of the new job opportunities she was working.  About 6 made it to the point of having a conversation with the person with hiring authority.

As she expects things to change each day, she is devoted to sending out updates via Twitter and Facebook to let her friends and contacts know who has been helpful. “I’m sending virtual thank-you letters for referrals. And we’re still trying new ideas. My fiancee has even offered a $100 referral bonus to anyone who can place me!” says Hartman.

Don’t count anyone out.

The job leads have come from unexpected directions. She has a unique opportunity to make a change in her career path, and has a lot of decisions ahead of her. Having an abundance of options is more than any job seeker can hope for in today’s economy, and she’s grateful for them. “It’s still all about connections,” says Hartman. “What’s different now is how you make them.”