In the era of ‘always connected’, the world grows seemingly smaller everyday. Everyone can now keep in touch with as many people as possible across their preferred social networks. Social networking has also found massive adoption within professional networks – both for IT recruiters and IT graduates seeking their first IT and tech role.
What is the level of keenness amongst recruiters about professional social networking?
IT recruiters are extremely keen about newly graduated IT students as potential new hires. More than a quarter of surveyed job recruiters accepted that social networks help them in a huge manner with hiring new recruits, from the initial advertisement through to ongoing communications and even providing feedback. Its a contact point that gets viewed many times a day.
How should one go about building an awesome social network profile?
For an ideal profile, first of all, one should have a profile picture posted. It can prove to be an asset as it helps recruiters to know their personality and they can short-list them according to their requirements. One should also include all the coursework and extracurricular activities that the graduate has done. It will also show a little about the job-seeker’s personality and how well polished they are.
If the graduate has done any internships, then their social profiles will often specify these too. Additional and complimentary knowledge and skills are usually well documented often with pictures and video – demonstrating to the recruiter their creative skills. This all helps to generate more interest in their profile. The candidate’s professors or academic advisers can add the cherry to the ‘icing on the cake’ by also recommending them with a few paragraphs of text.
Apart from being a job seeking platform – how else can social networking help IT students?
Graduates can find and research a much wider pool of technology opportunities and IT career paths than ever before. They can also get in touch with industry leaders via groups and forums and comment on industry specific news and articles. Communicating with new people with similar professional attributes is always an added advantage helped of course by social networking.
Social networking has opened many doors for millions of graduates since its emergence over the last 7 years. IT Students and graduates can search for, find and research many more interesting and relevant roles and careers, in a much more professional manner, than ever before!