What Color Is Your Parachute? (26 page)

There are all kinds of social media sites, from news to sharing videos, pictures, bookmarking, and social networking. Social networking expands the number of one’s social contacts by making connections through existing friends. Social networking has gone on for millennia, as long as humans have lived in groups larger than extended families.

The Internet has unlimited potential for multiplying connections through web-based groups like Facebook. With the Web, you can bridge the six degrees of separation very quickly. Perhaps you already belong to AvatarsUnited, Goodreads, Quarterlife, or MySpace. If you’ve used your site to meet people,
check in with friends, or find things out, you already know how it feels to have a network. That’s a good start. But did you know that you can use social networking sites to explore careers, meet people who do the work that interests you, and uncover internships and even job openings?

Recently, using both traditional social networking sites and sites specifically developed for expanding one’s business contacts has become the hot way to recruit new employees and find out about jobs. So here’s some basic information about safely using your current social networking site to expand your career awareness, find jobs and information about jobs, and make new contacts for the employment side of your life.

How to Stay Safe Using Social Networking

PARACHUTE TIP

“Social networking” is a technical term for online sites. Online social networking has nothing to do with being social in everyday terms.

The point of using a site you belong to now to explore careers is that you are connected to people you trust. Through your site friends it’s likely that you’ll be able to find out even more information about a field, job, or other career aspect that fascinates you than you’d be to uncover on your own. But before you dash off a post asking about circus jobs, you need to carefully plan how to minimize any risk to yourself. You need to plan how to manage, for your safety, how much access you allow new contacts. What image of you will they see when they contact you? Make a list of your ideas about how you want to look, and what you want to write about yourself and your career search. Which privacy settings will you use on your site?

To expand your list about how to keep safe and create your online image, talk to friends or ask a teacher whether time can be scheduled for a class discussion. Or get an adult with Internet and social media smarts to read over your list and add suggestions for how you keep yourself safe while exploring this whole new world of information. If, despite your best efforts, someone creeps you out, cease all contact and send all correspondence to one of your parents or an adult you trust. The world is full of wonderful and terrible people. (May you meet far more of the first kind.) You need a plan for online socializing that minimizes the chance of your meeting the second kind.

How to Use Social Networking for Career Exploration

With new applications and features, social networking sites have morphed into sites for job searching and creating a go-to network for career information. To get the most out of them, you’ll need to get savvy.

REALITY CHECK

No one is saying that your personal profile page on Facebook or MySpace shouldn’t remain your personal playground, but remember that nothing on the Internet is private anymore, so be careful what you post. As an added safeguard, ask your friends not to post embarrassing photos of you. It just may come back to haunt you when you go to apply for your dream job.

—KAREEN COX, career writer,
The Gleaner News
, Jamaica

The protocols and applications for using networking sites change so fast that whatever we describe will be obsolete by the time we finish typing this sentence. Well, maybe not that fast, but nearly. New sites and applications for them come out every month. If we walked you through the steps of setting up an account, by the time you read our descriptions the screens wouldn’t be the same. The Internet can help you learn more about how to use networking sites for career exploration and job search. Be sure to create an email address appropriate for the business world. Your first and last name run together, first initial and last name run together, or the name of your company if you’ve started a business are all acceptable. This is not the place to use a silly or risqué nickname.

Here are some helpful phrases for searching the Internet or Wikipedia:

• Using social networking to find a job

• Using social networking to find internships

• Setting up a social network site for job hunting

• Using (put name of specific social network here) for career information or job search

• Job finding online

Pages of links will come up. Look at the publishing dates and read several of the most recent. By using the same networking protocol as you would for an internship or job, you can also find job-shadowing opportunities and people to talk with about their work.

Creating a Solid Web Presence

Here are some tips to get you started.

1. Understand that the Internet is forever. Some people have posted images of themselves on the Web that their grandchildren will see someday. Has that thought ever crossed their minds, or do they really not care? Most adults have had a scrape in their youth that they’d not like to have revealed, much less have it circling the globe into infinity. With the Web, images sent out innocently can come back to hurt.

2. Do a search of your name. See what recruiters or human resource personnel will find if they do the same. About 77 percent of recruiters do web searches of potential applicants. Half of them have used information they’ve uncovered to eliminate candidates. Recruiters often, but not always, work for large businesses. Assume that small business owners, managers at nonprofit agencies, or workers at education institutions will search for you on the Web too.

3. If possible, set your profile privacy settings so only those you have approved have access to it. Because you can’t control what your friends might post, choose to block comments if such a setting is offered. Even if it was a friend—not you—who made an offensive post, it will be seen as a reflection on your character.

4. Ask friends, older siblings, coworkers, parents, and friends’ parents whether they have used social or business networking sites for career exploration or job hunting. If they have, you might want to ask for their help setting up your profile or ask to see their profiles as models.

5. When you contact people for career-related reasons (on the Internet or in real time), maintain professional manners at all times. (If you don’t know what professional manners are, you need to learn what they are and how to use them. Type the phrase “professional manners” into a search engine and learn from the articles that result.) There’s a line between taking initiative and stalking. Make sure you don’t cross it, and don’t let anyone stalk you. If you’ve sent a note and not gotten a response, it’s all right to send two more notes, each a week apart. After that, you may need a mutual friend to intercede on your behalf or accept that this person is not
going to respond. If someone is sending you multiple messages in a day, and they aren’t career related, block their access to you.

As to the image you project to the world, make it appropriate, both for your age and for public viewing. There are dozens of blogs, tweets, and Internet marketing impresarios that can give you ideas about how to craft your brand (that’s
you
, by the way). The old rule about having just one chance to make a good first impression takes on a new meaning with social networking. Social networking also lets you feel how small the world has gotten. Join any site and you may be contacted by people from around the world whose interests you share.

Twitter

As if social networking didn’t bring enough excitement to the Internet, some bright spark (Jack Dorsey) thought the added challenge of making posts in no more than 140 characters would make blogging even more fun. This micro-blogging began as a way to stay in touch, using posts called tweets to answer the question, “What’s happening?” and ended up creating a whole new subset of social media.