The Jobs Guy Becomes The Jobs Guys!

First off I want to thank all the people who have been following, retweeting and mentioning  TheJobsGuy on #FF.  I was especially grateful for the outpouring of support I received when posted “TheJobsGuy Gets a Pink Slip” back in June.  A lot has changed since then.

For starters, I am working again, Whaa Hooo!!  I am working in search engine marketing for Mosquito Interactive.  We help clients get their products and services ranked and found on Google and other search engines and build effective landing pages that capture leads, sell products/services or both.  I love my new gig and one cool feature is I work from my home which works perfect for my lifestyle.  I can only wish the same good fortune to all of you who are currently looking for your next gig.

Secondly, TheJobsGuy’s audience has continued to grow and flourish and more and more people are reaching out to me for help.  Now that I have a full time gig I’ve been working nights and weekends to try and keep up with demands of  TheJobsGuy and my growing network of job seekers, HR professionals and recruiters.  To that point I have been fortunate enough to come into contact with a number of fantastic, like minded people, two of whom will be joining me at TheJobsGuy, hence we will be calling ourselves “TheJobsGuys”.  Imagine that!

So with that said, I would like to introduce Mike Finley and Steve Feinberg.  Mike is a social media expert focusing on using blogging and Facebook to find jobs or recruit employees.  Steve has a 10 year track record as a professional recruiter and is a true expert at using LinkedIn to find the right candidate in a short period of time, something I’m sure all recruiters will want to know more about if you are not seriously leveraging LinkedIn now.

Between the three of us we hope to be timely in our responses to your questions, comments or concerns and provide a steady stream of relevant content, and valuable training & consulting on how to use social media in your job search or recruiting efforts.

Thanks again for all your support and we “TheJobsGuys” look forward to helping you through your job search or recruiting challenges  and getting America working again!

Social Media – Friend or Foe of the Job Seeker?

The buzz around using social media to find a job or find a candidate is starting to become very loud.  Frankly, if you are a recruiter and you haven’t started using social media sites like LinkedIn, FaceBook and Twitter to find and stay in touch with prospective candidates,  you are already behind.  Remember the Internet moves at the speed of the Internet and that’s pretty fast.  Things that seem important and relevant one day can be passe’ the next.  Take blogging for instance,  at one point there was more pressure on everyone to have a blog than we could stand.  Many of us caved in, with some of us finding  it useful, some finding it social and fun, and many finding it a complete waste of time.

Blogging has recently been displaced by micro-blogging through tools like Twitter that only allow a 140 character post.  Originally designed to help friends keep tabs on each other, Twitter has quickly displaced the blog as the tool of choice for anyone wanting to build a large audience of like minded people and stay in touch with them, and this brings us to the point of this blog post. (yes I am still blogging)  Are these various social media tools a friend or foe to the job seeker?

For those of you with Facebook and MySpace pages, know this, most good recruiters are now searching the Internet for people they are considering.  They can do this in a number of ways like simply typing your name into Google, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or other social media tools.  If you haven’t typed your own name into Google lately I highly recommend you try it and see what comes up.  For most people not much comes up when recruiters dig on the Internet and usually very little comes up that might affect a recruiters decision one way or the other.  But as Michael Phelps will tell you, having a picture of yourself taking a hit off a bong on your MySpace page or any of your friends pages who may have tagged you is probably not a good idea if you are looking for a professional position.  It’s a real bummer for the free spirits of the world who just now became aware of the fact that “The Man” actually has something to say about how much freedom they exhibit on the Internet.

So here is the bottom line for both job seekers and people in corporate America,  check out where and how you show up on the Internet.  If you find things that are not flattering or that may affect whether or not you get the job or promotion you are gunning for, find a way to remove it or take it down.

Going forward, you may want to seriously consider having two identities on the Internet, one  for your friends that makes no mention of your name and probably doesn’t contain any photos or mention of you doing drugs or engaging in sex acts ( I can’t believe I have to mention this but you would be surprised at what I have seen lately) and the other identity, which may include your name (i.e on LinkedIn) which you would share with recruiters or job seekers in an effort to acquire and maintain an on-line business relationship with people who can help you.

Oh ya, and in case you hadn’t noticed, I logged this post at about 1:45a.m. CST.  Who’s got time to manage their blog during working hours!