Facebook and LinkedIn Can Get You Hired Or Fired

6 Career-Killing Facebook Mistakes

by Erin Joyce, Managing Editor
Wednesday, April 7, 2010

provided by

With more than 400 million active visitors, Facebook is arguably the most popular social networking site out there. And while the site is known for the casual social aspect, many users also use it as a professional networking tool. With that kind of reach, Facebook can be a valuable tool for connecting to former and current colleagues, clients and potential employers. In fact, surveys suggest that approximately 30% of employers are using Facebook to screen potential employees — even more than those who check LinkedIn, a strictly professional social networking site. Don't make these Facebook faux-pas — they might cost you a great opportunity.

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1. Inappropriate Pictures
It may go without saying, but prospective employers or clients don't want to see pictures of you chugging a bottle of wine or dressed up for a night at the bar. Beyond the pictures you wouldn't want your grandparents to see, seemingly innocent pictures of your personal life will likely not help to support the persona you want to present in your professional life.

2. Complaining About Your Current Job
You've no doubt done this at least once. It could be a full note about how much you hate your office, or how incompetent your boss is, or it could be as innocent as a status update about how your coworker always shows up late. While everyone complains about work sometimes, doing so in a public forum where it can be found by others is not the best career move. Though it may seem innocent, it's not the kind of impression that sits well with a potential boss.

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3. Posting Conflicting Information to Your Resume
If you say on your resume that your degree is from Harvard, but your Facebook profile says you went to UCLA, you're likely to be immediately cut from the interview list. Even if the conflict doesn't leave you looking better on your resume, disparities will make you look at worst like a liar, and at best careless.

4. Statuses You Wouldn't Want Your Boss to See
Everyone should know to avoid statuses like "Tom plans to call in sick tomorrow so he can get drunk on a Wednesday. Who cares that my big work project isn't done?" But you should also be aware of less flamboyant statuses like "Sarah is watching the gold medal hockey game online at her desk". Statuses that imply you are unreliable, deceitful, and basically anything that doesn't make you look as professional as you'd like, can seriously undermine your chances at landing that new job.

5. Not Understanding Your Security Settings
The security settings on Facebook have come a long way since the site started. It is now possible to customize lists of friends and decide what each list can and cannot see. However, many people do not fully understand these settings, or don't bother to check who has access to what. If you are going to use Facebook professionally, and even if you aren't, make sure you take the time to go through your privacy options. At the very least, your profile should be set so that people who are not your friend cannot see any of your pictures or information.

6. Losing by Association
You can't control what your friends post to your profile (although you can remove it once you see it), nor what they post to their own profiles or to those of mutual friends. If a potential client or employer sees those Friday night pictures your friend has tagged you in where he is falling down drunk, it reflects poorly on you, even if the picture of you is completely innocent. It's unfortunate, but we do judge others by the company they keep, at least to some extent. Take a look at everything connected to your profile, and keep an eye out for anything you wouldn't want to show your mother.

Facebook Can Help You Get Hired … or Fired
The best advice is to lock down your personal profile so that only friends you approve can see anything on that profile. Then, create a second, public profile on Facebook purely for professional use. This profile functions like an online resume, and should only contain information you'd be comfortable telling your potential employer face to face. Having a social networking profile is a good thing — it presents you as technologically and professionally savvy. Just make sure your profile is helping to present your best side — not the side that got drunk at your buddy's New Year's party.

Article first found on Finance.Yahoo.com

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Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn to Find a Job

by Guy Kawasaki

Searching for a job can suck if you constrain yourself to the typical tools such as online jobs boards, trade publications, CraigsList, and networking with only your close friends. In these kinds of times, you need to use all the weapons that you can, and one that many people don’t—or at least don’t use to the fullest extent, is

From Maryland Employment

.
LinkedIn has over thirty-five million members in over 140 industries. Most of them are adults, employed, and not looking to post something on your Wall or date you. Executives from all the Fortune 500 companies are on LinkedIn. Most have disclosed what they do, where they work now, and where they’ve worked in the past. Talk about a target-rich environment, and the service is free.
Here are ten tips to help use LinkedIn to find a job. If you know someone who’s looking for a job, forward them these tips along with an invitation to connect on LinkedIn. Before trying these tips, make sure you’ve filled out your profile and added at least twenty connections

1. Get the word out. Tell your network that you’re looking for a new position because a job search these days requires the “law of big numbers” There is no stigma that you’re looking right now, so the more people who know you’re looking, the more likely you’ll find a job. Recently, LinkedIn added “status updates” which you can use to let your network know about your newly emancipated status.
2. Get LinkedIn recommendations from your colleagues. A strong recommendation from your manager highlights your strengths and shows that you were a valued employee. This is especially helpful if you were recently laid off, and there is no better time to ask for this than when your manager is feeling bad because she laid you off. If you were a manager yourself, recommendations from your employees can also highlight leadership qualities.
3. Find out where people with your backgrounds are working. Find companies that employ people like you by doing an advanced search for people in your area who have your skills. For example, if you’re a web developer in Seattle, search profiles in your zip code using keywords with your skills (for example, JavaScript, XHTML, Ruby on Rails) to see which companies employ people like you.
4. Find out where people at a company came from. LinkedIn “Company Profiles” show the career path of people before they began work there. This is very useful data to figure out what a company is looking for in new hires. For example, Microsoft employees worked at Hewlett-Packard and Oracle.
5. Find out where people from a company go next. LinkedIn’s “Company Profiles” also tell you where people go after leaving the company. You can use this to track where people go after leaving your company as well as employees of other companies in your sector. (You could make the case that this feature also enables to figure out which companies to avoid, but I digress.)
6. Check if a company is still hiring. Company pages on LinkedIn include a section called “New Hires” that lists people who have recently joined the company. If you have real chutzpah, you can ask these new hires how they got their new job. At the very least you can examine their backgrounds to surmise what made them attractive to the new employer.
7. Get to the hiring manager. LinkedIn’s job search engine allows you to search for any kind of job you want. However, when you view the results, pay close attention to the ones that you’re no more than two degrees away from. This means that you know someone who knows the person that posted the job—it can’t get much better than that. (Power tip: two degrees is about the limit for getting to hiring managers. I never help friends of friends of friends.) Another way to find companies that you have ties to is by looking at the “Companies in Your Network” section on LinkedIn’s Job Search page.
8. Get to the right HR person. The best case is getting to the hiring manager via someone who knows him, but if that isn’t possible you can still use LinkedIn to find someone inside the company to walk your resume to the hiring manager or HR department. When someone receives a resume from a coworker even if she doesn’t know the coworker, she almost always pays attention to it.

Read more: on Guy Kawasaki's blog

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MD Government Banned from communicating with constituents

It looks like an unelected buearuacrat who doesn't want to do his job is prohibiting OUR elected officials from engaging US in the manner we most prefer to be engaged.

I'm only going to publish the comments section of this important blog post from a written by Judd Legum, an attorney, progressive activist and Annapolis native.

Previously, Judd was the research director at the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, where he created the blog ThinkProgress, which remains one of the most popular progressive blogs on national policy and politics.

Most recently, Judd was research director for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. He graduated Georgetown Law in 2003 and currently practices law in Annapolis.

http://www.juddlegum.com/blog/2009/02/maryland-general-assembly-bans-facebook/

Phil In Denver on 06 Feb 2009 at 2:39 pm

This guy, Mike Gaudiello is NOT an elected official, he is an IT director. He does not have the right to make a decree of this magnitude if it interferes with the business of legislation, as clearly something like this certainly would do. As an IT director he would report to the head(s) of the Maryland General Assembly. Furthermore, viruses and phishing schemes can easily be blocked with anti-virus software and up to date browsers properly configured.

As an IT director he knows this all to well, so he is either incompetent and not qualified to hold that position, or he is injecting his own personal political agenda into his duties which as someone who serves the entire MGA, are by definition supposed to be non-partisan.

Sonja on 06 Feb 2009 at 5:05 pm #

Interesting that an IT director has the authority to select content that our elected officials find helpful and useful as an application. Wonder who blessed him with that much control? Rooted in ignorance methinks (is the IT person in inept that he cannot remedy a virus, one might ask?

This is a terrific template for whom not to hire when looking for IT people. Control-seeking individuals who overstep boundaries and claim security issues to further their own bias. Note to self, when searching for IT staff, make sure paranoia isn’t apparent in the resume. Maryland just moved back a few decades technologically.

Unfortunately, the 150 million people on Facebook might be worth another glance, Maryland. There is great potential for marketing, promotion, relationship building, resource sharing, collaboration, and problem-solving.

Steve on 06 Feb 2009 at 5:41 pm #

As being a Director of IT and having been in the IT field for over 32 years, the bottom line is clear. It doesn’t matter where the viruses come from, Facebook, MySpace, whatever. All this proves is that Maryland’s antivirus protection is severely lacking and horribly inadequate and proving the incompetence of the IT staff. It would be like a grocery store setting a policy to not accept checks anymore because someone wrote one that bounced. How absurd.

http://digg.com/politics/Maryland_General_Assembly_Bans_Facebook

because, after all, why would they want to make it easy for people to communicate with politicians and their staffs? it's almost like they don't want to hear from millennials or anybody else on social networks ..

=====

Newspapers Not Effectively Using Social Media

Need better integration
Newspapers should be using social media more effectively to engage their readers and boost online revenue, according to a new survey by Gartner."In the wake of the economic challenges facing the U.S. newspaper industry, publishers are losing focus on the crucial imperative of how to capitalize on those consumers who remain loyal, engaged online and print readers," said Allen Weiner, research vice president at Gartner.

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The survey indicates that newspaper Web sites are failing to optimize for search and a there is a lack of integration between content and social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Nearly half (49%) of respondents use general search engines (such as Google and Yahoo) once a week or more to find content, but only 20 percent use search tools built into a newspaper or magazine site.

Only 24 percent of those surveyed share good content with friends or others via email and instant messaging. Just 7 percent say they usually or often share content via embedding into social networks.

- Although many newspapers list their staffers who are on Twitter, an influential microblogging social network, few offer Twitter users the ability to "tweet" stories from their Web sites.

- When asked what they do when they find interesting content online, more than half of respondents (52 percent) said that they usually read it immediately. Only 9 percent said that they bookmark it to read later.

"Although it's easy to criticize the newspaper companies for falling behind the digital curve and not thinking innovatively about their future, some of the industry's current failures fall under the category of looking past the basics," Mr. Weiner said. "One of those basics is turning those who are fans of your product or service into your best and lowest-cost marketing channel. Even simple social media tools not only allow sharing and recommendations, but also provide a level of identity and reputation management to give others a snapshot of a content curator's credentials."

Mr. Weiner said that while the newspapers have incorporated social media content, they just haven't taken the step of integrating social media tools into their content management "ecosystem" to provide pervasive deployment of important social features. The task at hand is now to prioritize the integration of social media into a current or future content management system.

Additional information is available in the Gartner report "Newspaper Publishers Must Do More to Empower Brand Stewards." The report is available on Gartner's Website at http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=911415&subref=simplesearch.

Issue #57

Life in Frederick Maryland

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