5 Examples of Job Hunting with Social Media

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Guest Post by: George Cathcart

Job hunting in the age of social media can be a difficult thing to do. Trying to differentiate yourself in the sea of voices created by social makes it harder to stand out from the crowd and throwing a few pictures at the top of your CV isn’t quite going to cut it any more.

Below are 5 of what we think are the best examples of people and companies using social media to help with job hunting. Enjoy.

1) Graeme Anthony and the C.V.I.V.

When Graeme Anthony sent his prospective C.V.I.V. (curriculum vitae interactive video) he didn’t anticipate the amount of buzz it would create. Although not originally intended for the public eye, you can appreciate why it went down so well. A truly pioneering effort from someone that clearly ‘gets’ the digital mindset.

2) Laura Tosney

Laura, like Graeme, understood the power of video for job applications and the touching stop motion video below showcases Laura’s creative side beautifully. Again, like Graeme, this got the attention of her soon-to-be-employer quite effectively, and she got the job.

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3) Susan Lewis hires a boss

Every once in a while someone comes along and turns a concept on its head. Susan is one such person. Reflecting on the traditional model of ‘person asks company if they could work for them’, Susan broke the status quo, and started a blog where she hired her boss. The uptake on this wasn’t unanimously good, but this kind of change in attitude isn’t going to wash with everyone. You can read the blog here.

4) Alec Brownstein – The Google Job Experiment

Falling perhaps slightly outside of the social media remit, but incredibly relevant all the same, the Google Job Experiment by Alec Brownstein was an incredibly insightful reflection on the (what some call narcissistic) tendency of people to Google themselves. Armed with this knowledge, he paid for a Google Adwords campaign to target 5 high-level executives. Check the video below to see the results.

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5.) The Saatchi & Saatchi Internship

This time the shoe is on the other foot, and Saatchi & Saatchi have used social media to recruit for their summer scholarship.

At a basic level, the brief asked grads to start a new Twitter account and get as high a rating as possible. The top 250 applicants would move onto the next stage of the process. This is a fascinating use of social media to hunt for grads, and a similar campaign back in 2010 using Facebook groups resulted in 5 full-time hires.

The Facebook group can be found here.

Original Post: http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2011/03/social-media-finding-a-job/