Quintessential Careers Press:
Job Search 2.0: Advancing Your Career Through Online Social Media
Introduction: The New Job Search Is All About Relationships
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Where a dedicated careerist of old constructed a job-seeking identity through a resume and a few other printed materials disseminated to audiences that seem puny by today's standards, postmillennial upwardly mobile types are establishing their career identities to vast global audiences using the tools of Web 2.0. The concept of Web 2.0 "suggests that everyone ... can and should use digital media to express and realize themselves," writes Andrew Keen in The Daily Standard. Ryan Leary of Kenexa notes that job-seekers now need to become "content-producers."
The interconnectedness whose seeds are currently being planted with social networks is yielding an environment of relationships. Relationships forged on the Internet are gaining trustworthiness. "Imagine you're looking for a job," writes social-media guru Chris Brogan. "Where do you start? What do you need to know? I'll give you a hint" the first letter is 'p' and the last few letters are 'eople.'" Futurists prognosticate that education, recruiting, and pipeline-building will fuse into more tightly knit functions. The demand for company Web sites that sell the candidate on working for the organization will only increase, and employers will seek out workers in new relationship-based ways.
Generation Y, the Millennials, are major drivers of much of the movement toward the Web 2.0 job search. They are multimedia whizzes who can produce and upload audio and video as easily as their older counterparts type a letter. Fifty percent of them communicate via text-messaging, and most prefer that mode and instant-messaging over e-mail, according to recruiting guru, Dr. John Sullivan. The ways they communicate and keep in touch with others are inspiring new online ways to connect. Of the Millennials' ubiquitous participation in social-media sites, Steve Rothberg of CollegeRecruiter.com writes: "We have reached a tipping point in how this new generation interacts with each other." He trumps Sullivan's characterization of the generation's communication habits by noting that connecting through sites like MySpace and Facebook is supplanting instant-messaging.
"Today employers are seeking out all the information they can on blogging and social media as they prepare to engage millennials," says Matt Martone, manager of media sales for Yahoo HotJobs, as quoted by Lauren Mackelden of Online Recruitment Magazine.
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