Yesterday, Julio presented to my COMM 464 class why we should invest our time to build our social media profiles professionally and taught us great tips on how to do so on LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. It made me realize that more and more employers are now not only reviewing resumes and cover letters that we send them, but they will also take a proactive approach by looking into our social media pages to complement the hiring review process.

I thought I’d try to do some research to find out more about this topic and stumbled upon surprising facts:

Apparently in 2014, 93% of recruiter now use social media review to help with recruitment process! This is because they expect increase in job competition by 2015, and to anticipate this, recruiters plan to invest 73% more time in using social profile review of job applicants to further enhance the recruitment process quality. Not surprisingly though, the Marketing field is one of the job fields that will see a rise in job competition and thus, further emphasize that job applicants in this industry need to differentiate themselves through social profiles.

Recruiters have gained success by this method as employers gained a 44% increase in candidate quality and quantity. This may have also been contributed by 55% of recruiters reconsider candidates thanks to the help of social profile review.

Although it may seem scary and overwhelming to know that recruiters are now starting to asses our social profiles to evaluate us as a job candidate, maybe we should not be too intimidated after all. As of now, only 75% of recruiters who use this method actually claim themselves as experts in assessing social profiles for job recruitment. This leaves us with plenty of space in how we can market ourselves through social profiles as there are no right or wrong answer as to how our social profile should look like. In fact, we should use this opportunity to help make our profile unique and eye-catching from other candidates by taking advantage of the individuality-oriented feature of social media profiles. Some of my favourite social profile interpretation can be seen below:

 

Source: http://mashable.com/2014/11/17/job-recruitment-social-media/

http://www.businessinsider.com/these-are-the-best-tech-resumes-2014-11?op=1