10 Ways to Use Twitter in Your Job Search

Nisa Chitakasem, co-Founder of career consulting company www.positionignition.com, shares ten top tips for using Twitter effectively in your job search, taken from their latest eBook 125 Twitter Job Search Tips…

When you first sign up to Twitter, you’re guided through the initial stages by a short tutorial. It prompts you to follow a few ‘Twitter superstars’ and to check out which of your email contacts are already using the microblogging site. After being steered through those first few steps, however, you’re pretty much on your own. You’re left staring at a blank profile that you’re meant to populate with your bio and tweets—‘tweets’ being the 140-character real-time status updates that users share with one another. It’s easy to feel lost in this ostensible sea of nothing.

With Twitter boasting some 230 million tweets a day and 100 million active users, it would be a shame for us as job seekers to let this feeling of being lost prevent us from getting the most out of the social network. After all, the job hunter can use Twitter to keep track of their chosen industry and the influencers within it, interact with useful contacts old and new, get the latest on employment opportunities and update their followers with their own news on their job search and current work. The instantaneous nature of Twitter makes it a social media platform ideal for monitoring and engaging with the fast-moving labor market of the 21st century.

Although many of us claim not to ‘understand’ or ‘get’ Twitter, it really doesn’t have to mystify us so. Here’s how to quickly establish your presence on the site and use it for all your job search needs.

1. Make your bio count. Use your bio to explain what you want out of your next career move and what value you will bring to your next employer. For example: “As a senior marketing executive with over 15 years’ experience in the sector, I’m currently looking for an interim position in X type of organisation.”
2. Upload an appropriate photo. Use a headshot of yourself as your profile photo. A close-up of your face implies authenticity and inspires people to trust you. Be sure that you look smart and professional in the picture. If you crop the photo using Twitter’s in-built feature, be careful not to cut the wrong part off. You want people to be able to see your whole face in the avatar, not just the bottom of it.
3. Follow the right accounts. Here are some ideas for the types of account all job seekers should be following:

• Industry experts or bloggers in your field
• Job boards and job sites
• News alerts and industry magazines
• Career experts and career coaches – people who can give you advice
• Head hunters and recruiters
• Professional networks and alumni associations
• HR personnel – people who are hiring for the position you are targeting.

4. Monitor job site streams. Regularly check the accounts of the job sites you’re following, as they’ll often tweet links to vacancies as soon as they come out.
5. Track down the employer you want to work for. Follow the companies that you are interested in joining, or that operate within the industry you are looking to get into. There are certain triggers or events that can lead to or impact upon an organisation’s hiring patterns, so it’s good to be aware of them and to monitor and keep track of them. For instance, if a business gets new funding, ships a new product or launches in a new location or region, it’s a sign that it may be actively recruiting. Alternatively if it’s scaling down its product range, closing sites or announcing layoffs and restructuring measures, it is likely to be hiring less. Keep an eye out for these events. If you find it helpful, you can set up alerts so that when the keywords you specify, e.g. “funding” or “merger” trigger an alert, notification of this news will be sent directly to you.
6. Get networking. Target specific key people to connect with, who may be able to help you get closer to this job that you desire. It’s worth making new connections for a number of reasons – to learn about the industry, to find out information on how a particular company works or what the role is like from the inside, or to find a route to a potential employer. Think about all of these angles and use Twitter to network your way to your next role.
7. Tweet regularly. Aim to tweet at least a few times every day. If you tweet more infrequently than this, you’ll find it harder to build up relationships with your followers and will lose the momentum of Twitter as a job search tool.
8. Keep tweets professional. When you’re finding a new job, the majority of your tweets should be business related. They don’t all have to be specifically about your job hunt, but they should be professional. Make them related to your field of work, area of interest or what kind of thing you’re looking for next in your career.
9. Showcase your value. Show off your expertise through your tweets, if you can. Share your own specific thoughts, ideas, insight and opinions that demonstrate your knowledge and that can build up your reputation as the ‘go to’ person for your field. Think of these tweets as ‘thought leadership tweets’.
10. Stay focused on what you want. Everything that you spend your time on Twitter doing, whether it’s tweeting or looking for job postings, organisations to follow and people to connect with, make sure that it links back to and stays focused on the role that you have identified you want. Everything you engage in and emphasise should relate to this specific role and target.

Author Bio

By Nisa Chitakasem, Founder of Position Ignition, the UK’s leading Career Consulting Company, and co-author of their eBook 125 Twitter Job Search Tips. Nisa co-founded Position Ignition.com to provide career consulting to people looking for guidance and support through their career change, new career direction, job search and career development .For a free initial phone consultation visit their website or contact them now: enquiries@positionignition.com