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  • Career Services and Social Media

    By Eric Stoller July 22, 2010 8:58 pm EDT

    The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) 2009 Career Services Benchmark Survey for Four-Year Colleges and Universities lists career counseling as the number one service offered by collegiate career centers. Teaching students how to conduct a job search is a crucial aspect of the career counseling process.

    I was exploring the twittersphere this morning when I came upon a terrific blog post about how one savvy communicator strategically used social media for a job search. Trish Freshwater was hired for her current position at Sodexo, Inc. because of her social media endeavors. Freshwater used LinkedIn to post "relevant information and recommendations from former colleagues." She also joined a LinkedIn group for Sodexo careers.

    Twitter was the next social media site on her journey to being hired by Sodexo. Freshwater followed key Sodexo employees in the areas where she wanted to work. She engaged with them via retweets and posted tweets that were relevant to the communications position that she wanted. It took about a month of social media engagement before Freshwater was offered a position as the senior communications manager for Sodexo's Talent Acquisition Group.

    Freshwater was recently featured in a segment on using social media for job searches on "Good Morning America." Note that she had only been in her job for two weeks prior to GMA's feature.

    Freshwater's story is a case study in how individuals can use social media in their job search. Do you work in career services and have a social media success story? What social media tools/sites are you sharing with your students?

    Do you tweet? Follow me on Twitter.

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Comments on Career Services and Social Media

  • Social Media & The Job Search
  • Posted by Christian Garcia , Director/Toppel Career Center at University of Miami on July 23, 2010 at 11:30am EDT

  • At the U of Miami career center we have had a presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for a while now but have stepped up our activity in the past year. Staff members are assigned as the "manager" of a specific resource but we're all responsible for adding content. This has helped to make sure we're sending out timely information, and from different perspectives. We also added a Toppel Peer Advisor Blog (http://umcareercenterblog.tumblr.com/) which is comprised of content by students, for students. Recently, we created a section on our website called "Social Media, Your Online Professional Image, and Your Job Search" which is aimed at educating students on the different sites and proper way of using them: http://www.sa.miami.edu/toppel/mainSite/students/socialmediaandyou.aspx.

    We are now focusing our efforts on educating students on the importance of using LinkedIn, not only for the job search, but for conducting company research and gathering important industry information. NACE's preliminary report of their 2010 Student Survey showed that students used Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter significantly more than LinkedIn. While we certainly encourage students to use many resources, we feel LinkedIn needs to be at the top of the list!
    You can read NACE's report here: http://www.naceweb.org/Publications/Spotlight_Online/2010/0609/Social_Networking_Accounts_for_Little_Job-Search_Activity.aspx?referal=

  • Reflections
  • Posted by Mallory , Assistant Director, Career Center at UNCP on July 23, 2010 at 2:15pm EDT

  • Our Career Center has been trying to figure out an effective way to teach/model good social media use. UNCP, departmentally, is pretty connected on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. Students seem resistant to "cleaning up" their profiles and public interactions they have on the web.

    I used the students in my Intro to Career Development course as a sample group. The use of written reflections helped me to benchmark my students' social media knowledge/use. I had students search for themselves using three different search engines (Bing, Yahoo, and Google). They had to examine the search results and decide if it painted an accurate picture of who they are and if an employer would want to hire them.

    This exercise got them thinking about perceptions and presence. They even noticed the fact that social media sites index high in search engines. Many students made changes to privacy settings, uploaded more professional profile pictures, started blogs, and created Linkedin accounts. A great starting point for students who haven't made the connections yet.

  • Colleges need to adapt
  • Posted by kenskorner , Student Advocate/Blogger at CUStudentloans.org on July 23, 2010 at 2:45pm EDT

  • Schools need to use social media to engage students using a current and relevent medium. The challenge is that schools are slow to change, but continue to receive guaranteed government subsidies to maintain stable salaries. Schools have record enrollment now, but how much of what is being taught is useful in the new economy? Glad to see an examaple of someone using social media to get the job they need. Great Post!

    http://j.mp/dD2kC4

  • Posted by mitchel , Career Ideas on October 8, 2010 at 11:31am EDT
  • After a long wait and shrewd patience we should be rewarded with something like this. To learn and fulfil your career is truly a magnificent way to change the course of our daily lives.

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