Do you know what recruiters like more than anything? Easy access to find quality candidates and few barriers to entry. Do you know one way you can provide this? Use Facebook as a professional platform.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know posting unprofessional information on Facebook can prevent you from landing a job. Employers don’t like profanity, comments about illegal drugs, posts of a sexual nature or excessive misspellings and bad grammar. What they do like, according to Jobvite’s research, is to be able to find you online and to learn about you. If you put time, effort and energy into creating some public information in Facebook, you could find yourself with a new job sooner than you thought.
Recruiters are looking for you.
Recruiters will source new hires where ever they can find them. With the exponential number of people using Facebook and the amount of time they spend there, it isn’t surprising to learn from Undercover Recruiter that 70 percent of recruiters say they connect better with potential jobseekers due to widespread use of Facebook and 85 percent of recruiters using Facebook recommend it as a tool to other recruiters. (Tweet this stat.)
Companies are spending a lot of time, effort and money to connect with you on Facebook. They want you to “like” their career pages, and they hope you’ll post smart messages there. Don’t disappoint them.
Make your information available.
You don’t have to post your vacation photos for everyone to see, but if you want to be found, it’s a good idea to allow certain sections of your Facebook profile to be public, including: Work and Education, Professional Skills and Contact information. Not only will this make it possible for people looking for someone with your skills to find you, it also provides professional information that will help people in your network connect with you when they are in job search mode.
Another benefit of making this data public, it allows you to engage with Glassdoor.com’s“Inside Connections” tool, which provides job seekers access to their Facebook networks to identify people who work at companies with interesting jobs. When people in your network provide public professional data on Facebook, you’ll also be able to access information from friends of friends for networking purposes via this tool. Clearly, making these items public on Facebook helps you be found as well as enhances networking opportunities. Since four in ten job seekers found their favorite or best job through personal connections, don’t ignore this opportunity to tap your online network.
Give them a little something.
Since many recruiters want to know a little something about you beyond what’s on your resume, why not give them a little professional information? Create public updates in your private Facebook page and you have the opportunity to post and share certain items that will be easy for people you do not know to find. This is easy to do.
Follow the link on the top of your Facebook page to check your privacy settings.
Once there, click on the icon that says “Followers” on the left side of the screen. Then, under Who Can Follow Me, select the drop down that says “Everybody.”
This will give you an option to create public updates and for people to “follow” your public updates. Public updates can include links to news about your industry. If you’re in customer service, you can occasionally post a public update about the latest customer service trends. If you are a bank teller, you can post links about your company’s financials.
Answer the key question.
There’s no more important question to answer for job seekers than, “How can I help employers find me?” Facebook could be one way to answer it.
Originally appeared on AOLJobs.com.