Importance of Social Media for Finding New Opportunities

The recent post which summarised the Announcement: UKOLN – Looking Ahead was based on the news of the cessation of UKOLN’s core funding from 31 July 2013. The announcement concluded:

From August 2013, we will continue to build on this reputation and we very much look forward to working with you again in the future.

In order to support UKOLN staff in exploiting new opportunities I recently gave a training session on “Managing Your Digital Profile“. In the talk I described the value of social media in developing relationships with potential new partners, co-authors and funders which can be of value in one’s current job as well as in finding new jobs and opportunities.

During the session I was asked if there was one key service to make use of. I highlighted the importance of LinkedIn and provided examples of effective uses of LinkedIn. Just before Christmas @suebecks alerted me to a post entitled For job recruiters, Monster out, LinkedIn in. This post provided evidence of the ways in which LinkedIn is being used:

LinkedIn, the biggest professional-network​ing website, got into the field early with the introduction of Recruiter in 2008. The service lets headhunters search its more than 187 million profiles and contact potential candidates.

Since last year, Adobe has found more than half its new hires through LinkedIn. Adobe, the biggest graphic-design software company, uses job boards to fill only about 5% of openings.

In the session I went on to describe how I felt it was a mistake to think there was a single key service to use. I argued that there were a range of services which provided different functions and were used by different communities. I went on to describe how researchers could find value in claiming a Google Scholar profile and providing access to their research publications using services such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, as well as claiming an ORCID ID.

I was asked if Facebook had a role to play. I described how this would relate to the personal ways in which one uses the service – but mentioned that Facebook is the third most important referrer of traffic to this blog. In addition I suggested that Facebook may have a role to play in finding new opportunities, and illustrated this by showing how a Google search for “Facebook Bath jobs“ found a Facebook page for jobs at Future Publishing. The potential relevance of Facebook for job-seekers was highlighted in the article For job recruiters, Monster out, LinkedIn in:

Two-thirds of companies already use Facebook, the world’s largest social-networking service, to find recruits using the site’s friend-finding search function, according to a June survey of more than 1,000 human resources professionals by recruiting software maker Jobvite. Fifty-four percent use micro-blogging service Twitter to learn about potential candidates’ views and interests, the survey found.

The article then went on to suggest new developments we may see for people looking for new opportunities:

The next challenge is to develop advanced tools that find greater detail on candidates from more social networks, says Brian O’Malley, a general partner at Battery Ventures. His firm has invested in social job-search startup Entelo, which trawls Twitter, Google’s Google+ and other sites, using proprietary algorithms to find candidates for specific positions and predict who among them may be open to offers.

Can you afford not to make use of social media if you are looking for new business opportunities in the future?

Note as mentioned above the slides on “Managing Your Digital Profile” are available on Slideshare and embedded below:

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