Ask him how his job search is going, and Craig Stack will tell you he’s frustrated as hell. The displaced trade operations manager wakes up at the crack of dawn every morning, types Indeed.com into his browser and checks to see what new job openings have been posted. Next, he goes to LinkedIn to find out if anyone in his network is hiring, then he searches the major job boards like Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder.
“I apply for every job I qualify for,” says Stack, who estimates he’s sent out 600 resumes in his 13 months of unemployment. In response, he’s gotten fewer than a dozen e-mails even acknowledging that his material has been received.
“I feel like I’m sending my resume into a black hole,” says Stack, who used to earn big bucks providing services for the likes of Barclays, Computershare and Equiserve.
Ryan Hebert’s experience with job boards wasn’t much better. While the management consultant got occasional calls from recruiters when he used sites like Monster.com, they never amounted to much.
So instead of spending his time on job sites, Hebert decided to give social networks a try. He tweaked and updated his LinkedIn profile every few weeks, and worked at growing and cultivating his network of connections.
“Almost every time I added something to my profile, I was contacted by recruiters,” he says. It didn’t take long before he figured out that sites like LinkedIn send out notices to your connections whenever you update your credentials. As a result of his efforts, Hebert landed seven or eight quality interviews, one of which resulted in a job at Ernst & Young.
Hebert discovered something millions of other job seekers have yet to learn — that more and more employers are utilizing social networks as part of their hiring strategies. Instead of passively inspecting resumes that land on their desks, they’re using Twitter to broadcast job openings; they’re using LinkedIn to search for and connect with workers who meet specific job requirements, they’re using Facebook to brand themselves and to court potential hires, and they’re using social media widgets that deliver relevant information to potential candidates’ iPhones and Facebook pages.
“We will use every opportunity we have to connect directly with the job seeker as opposed to through a job board,” says Carrie Corbin, senior human resources manager at AT&T.
And it’s not only big companies that are leveraging social networks for hiring.
“Ninety percent of the under-30-year-old entrepreneurs that are building multimillion-dollar businesses that I know — when they hire somebody, they don’t look at a resume,” says Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of the Wine Library and author of “Crush It! Why Now Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion.”
“They’re searching Google. They’re looking at their Facebook account. They’re searching them on Twitter.”
What this means for job seekers is that an active social Web presence (i.e., a LinkedIn profile, a Facebook page, a Twitter handle) and a sizable network of connections are an increasingly important way to get a recruiter’s attention — and land a job. And maintaining Web visibility is almost as important for those who are currently employed.
“Making yourself findable on the Web in a way that highlights your professional strengths is key to managing your career,” says David Manaster, founder of the Executive Recruiters Exchange, an online community for recruiters. “If you don’t do this now, you’ll be falling behind.”
If you’re not convinced “social recruiting” is the wave of the future, consider that companies like Ernst & Young have thousands of fans on their Facebook pages, that Googlejobs has nearly 11,500 Twitter followers, and that more than 200 people applied for jobs via a recently launched “Work With Me” Facebook widget that Enterprise Holdings’ employees downloaded to their pages in order to get credit for employee referrals.
“While applying for a job via a personal or social connection isn’t a silver bullet to a job, it does provide a substantial advantage,” says Marie Artim of Enterprise.
CV overload
There are numerous reasons why employers are turning to social networks for recruiting. Among them is cost. Consider that resume database access to sites like Monster.com can cost as much as $12,000 per recruiter per year, and that a single job posting can run almost $400.
“I can’t justify the expense,” says a staffing manager at a Fortune 10 firm whose company’s policy won’t allow her to be named. “I can search LinkedIn for free.”
Resume overload is another factor. One staffing manager at a publishing firm said she received more than 1,000 responses after advertising a project manager position on the Web last month.
“It’s too much to wade through,” she says. “Instead of spending my time engaging qualified candidates, I spend it discarding resumes.”
The deluge is not surprising, given that on some sites all it takes is a few mouse clicks to send a resume to thousands of employers.
“It’s too easy,” says Chernee Vitello of Whiting Consulting. “Sometimes as many as 98 percent of the resumes I get aren’t a fit; they’re like spam.”
So it’s not hard to understand why recruiters are jazzed about the candidates they meet via the social Web — who, to the extent that someone the recruiter knows and trusts is involved in the connection, come prescreened. Two of the three referrals Vitello recently got from Facebook were a fit.
“The quantity is smaller but the quality is much higher,” she says.
For job seekers, the reward is a direct connection to companies they’re interested in, and an experience notably different from Stack’s “black hole” experience. AT&T, for example, has more than 20 employees whose job it is to respond to job-seeker inquiries on its social networking sites.
“Social networks require real-time responses,” says Dan Black, Ernst & Young’s director of campus recruiting for the Americas.
That said, this type of hiring process tends to be slower than getting a job via a job board, though.
“Maybe you don’t yield anything from connecting immediately,” says Jessica Lee of APCO Worldwide, noting that the intention is to build a relationship over time.
“It’s a lot like online dating,” she says, explaining that conversations begin on the Web and move to the phone and actual meet-ups only after a period of time.
Marketing Me
The upshot of all this is that if you’re looking for a job, or may be in the future (a definition that covers pretty much everyone), and you don’t already have a Web presence and an active network, the time to get one is now. We asked some experts how best to go about it.
* Don’t wait until you’re jobless. “People who had live, healthy, thriving social networks and who used Linkedin as a communications tool as opposed to a digital resume still have jobs today,” Chris Brogan, co-author of “Trust Agents” and founder of New Marketing Labs, told a packed Web 2.0 Expo audience at the Javits Center last month. “People who built their resume after they got laid off or networked only with people in their industry are still looking for jobs 16, 18, 19, 20 months later.”
* Make your Web profiles engaging. Create them to not only to be informative, but to encourage conversation, as well.
“Humans love to be entertained, to be intrigued, to be excited,” says Brogan. He suggests that a LinkedIn profile containing a statement like “I can turn pumpkins into coaches, and make princesses out of cinder maids,” will generate more interest than one saying “I wrote ad copy for five years.”
* Connect with as many people as possible. Ask your connections to introduce you to their connections.
“It’s no longer just who you know, it’s who you know plus everyone they know,” says Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era.”
* Leverage your experience. “State what your capabilities are in terms of how they can be leveraged for future roles,” says Brogan.
If, for example, you’re an office assistant who wants to get into p.r., but your current role is mostly answering phones and keeping calendars, play up your interpersonal skills and your ability to read people’s desires. Then translate those capabilities into solutions you can offer, like an ability to manage complex schedules and meet deadlines. “All these skills would appeal to people in the p.r. business,” he says.
* Listen before you tweet. “If you’re interested in a particular subject, use Twitter’s search function to find out who is tweeting about that subject, then follow them,” says Veronica Fielding of Digital Brand Expressions, an Internet marketing firm. Once you know enough to join in on a conversation, use a hash tag [#] and a keyword that label the topic so birds of a feather can find you.
* Tweet smart. Beware of self-promotion and white noise. Instead, search the Web for things people in your industry might find useful and tweet about them.
“Position yourself as a thought leader,” says Fielding.
* Be a re-tweeter. “Bringing something that you find useful to your followers’ attention is not only nice, but it’s a great way to compliment the person who originated the tweet,” says Fielding.
* Take a page. Join the Facebook fan pages of places that you’d like to work. It’s a good way to learn about the company and to engage with people who work there.