Do you want to enhance your Online Presence for Your Career? Everyone is connected, which makes it easy for companies and recruiters to find out about prospective employees’ attitudes toward work and determine whether they are suitable for the position.
Employers commonly look at social media profiles when searching for applicants online. The results can either help or hurt you, depending on the findings. The steps we have outlined here will help you build an online presence that enhances, not detracts, your application.
1. See what your current footprint looks like
The first thing you should do is do an online search of your first and last name. You can also set up an alert for your name for an added level of convenience, so you are notified of any new content.
At least skim through the first few pages of results. Ensure you test a few different search combinations, such as your name and your school name, your name and your city, and any usernames you have.
Don’t hesitate to contact the website owner if you find anything that would be inappropriate or that you would not want an employer to see. Whenever you see an embarrassing photo on your friend’s social media, remove the tags identifying you from the picture, or ask them to remove it from their feed.
2. Keep up with the latest privacy developments.
Your profile policies determine how searchable your profile is and how you can restrict who can view your postings. For potential employers to find your profile page easily, you need to enable them to do so. Ensure that what you publish (and what they have access to) accurately portrays you.
3. Take advantage of your limited bio space.
When it comes to attracting the attention of employers, the description of your social network bio is crucial. For example, on Facebook, you would summarize what you can offer employers within a limited amount of space, including your experience, personality, interests, skills, etc. You can think of it as a resume.
A bio is more conversational and can encapsulate more information about you than a standard resume ever could.
4. Be careful about what you post and share
Using social media is all about connections, so when posting content, it’s essential to consider which doors you’d like open and which you’d like shut. You may make connections with like-minded folks if you post highly personal content, but you may also alienate others. For building your brand, you need to determine which is most important and share content accordingly.
Additionally, it would be best if you always kept in mind that unprofessional, malicious, illegal, or unethical content should never, ever, ever be posted anywhere. You can easily be linked to personal or professional sites with minimal effort. No matter how fun the party was, resist the urge to post those photos. Your employability is unlikely to be enhanced by them. How would you feel if your boss saw those pictures if you were working? Keep them off the internet if possible.
5. Consistency evaluation
What is the impact of your social media presence on your resume? Potential employers may be alarmed if your social media presence is nonexistent. Inadequately updating your profile and failing to include details from your resume makes you look sloppy. The worst-case scenario is if you have listed multiple jobs. In this situation, you come across as unfocused at best and duplicitous at worst. You can add some of your resumes to your LinkedIn profile if you don’t have too much content on it.
6. Create a social network profile that integrates with your website
Maintaining consistency across your social media accounts is crucial. We may choose to log in to our Facebook accounts using a nickname while reserving our official names for more professional purposes. Depending on the profile, it’s possible to include a middle name, dialect name, or Christian name.
Make it easier for recruiters to find you. Make sure you use the same name throughout all your profiles. If you use a nickname, it may appear less professional and less relevant to your real name.
7. Regularly update your profile.
Having all those badges will be pretty pointless if your profiles do not contain your most up-to-date information. Recruiters can better assess your skills if they can see your most recent job descriptions, accomplishments, and other life changes.
When your profiles aren’t up-to-date, this may indicate that you’re not interested enough to be recruited. To avoid irritating recruiters, update your profile on all social networks when necessary to keep your updates consistent.
8. Online Sharing of Your Work
You need to showcase your work online if you want to impress employers. This is particularly important for creative professionals. By promoting your artwork and other designs on well-known online communities and photo-sharing sites such as DeviantArt, Behance, Flickr, and Instagram, you can do that.
As specialized communities and networks have an abundance of designers and artists, such sites create a conducive environment for contributions and comments. Often, you can tap into a wealth of experience and build a positive reputation for yourself.
Final Words
Before posting anything online, always think carefully. To protect your professional reputation or career opportunities, you must be confident it will not harm you. In this way, you won’t need to comb through your content to remove anything or contact websites for assistance.
Additionally, there should be no negative comments posted about others, such as classmates, former coworkers, professors, etc. In addition to hurting others’ reputations, negative posts will reflect poorly on you.
You should be aware that it might take a while for negative posts to disappear from search results if you want to remove them. Rather than deleting something later, it’s always better not to post something you may regret!
Also Read: The Top 10 most inspiring LinkedIn influencers in Tech
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