Professional Profile, how?

Indeed, more companies are going digital and are utilizing social media platforms as a means to see if a candidate is suitable for a job position (Quast, 2012).  I thought that it is vital especially for us because we are in the marketing industry where the ability to “showcase” and “brand” the company’s at its best should be our forte. Therefore, having to showcase ourselves online professionally should be a “basic” skill that we should all have. So how do we do that?

Utilizing the RIGHT tools

I guess having more online tools does not mean that it is better. It is about utilizing the right tools to portray myself at its best. This is when we have to put ourselves into the employer’s perspective – what are they seeking for? Perhaps this might relate to the type of industry we are in. For example, if we are in the marketing industry, we might want to portray our creativity. And how could we show that we are creative? Perhaps writing a CV could not really help but showcasing our creativity through a video on YouTube could.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_PZTAW5piQ

I would like to relate this back to Gary Vaynerchuk where he talks about utilizing the right tools base on our “DNA” (Vaynerchuk, 2009). This makes sense especially if you are an introvert and you might not really want to use a video as it might not come out well etc.

Avoid posting images or opinions that reflect negatively on you

Yes, we all have our own personal life and there is always something call the privacy setting. But guess what, if your friends had a screenshot – whatever privacy setting is going to be useless. Just like what Lisa had shared with us that there are now blurring boundaries between what is public and private.

Recently, Singapore has many of such cases whereby neitizens had extreme negative opinions that do not reflect well on their values. One recent example would be Anton Casey as shown below:

Picture Source: (Mothership, 2014)

His company fired him immediately because all companies would like to be reflected well and such association of bad behaviour would harm the company’s image. Therefore I feel that we should be very careful as to what we post online because we are ambassadors of our company.

Picture Source: (Times, 2014)

This is further supported by what Lisa had shared with us today where Trevor Kaufman, seems to be losing his opportunity to run for President because of a photo he posted online years ago (SubPly, 2014).

Continuous Effort and Participation

Lastly, I believe that most of us already have a LinkedIn Profile. However, it stops there, right? At least for me because I hardly do any updates or visit it. Continuous effort made our profile look “authentic” as we are not making things up last minute only when there are opportunities coming up. Perhaps apart from update of our “achievements”, we could join and participate in network discussions, participate in professional events, share articles related to our industry and follow companies on social media. These little activities show genuine interest and thereby address “authenticity” of our online profile.

That’s all folks!

References:

Mothership. (2014). Retrieved from http://mothership.sg/2014/01/former-miss-spore-universes-husbands-anti-social-facebook-rant-results-in-massive-online-backlash/

Quast, L. (2012, 05 21). News. Retrieved from Forbes: http://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaquast/2012/05/21/recruiting-reinvented-how-companies-are-using-social-media-in-the-hiring-process/

SubPly. (2014). Retrieved from SubPly: http://www.subply.com/en/Video/Report+Every+Potential+2040+President+Already+Unelectable+Due+To+Facebook/50b94132-93b6-4b48-9809-47d55a940ca4/eng

Times, T. S. (2014, Jan 25). Retrieved from The Straits Times: http://www.straitstimes.com/breaking-news/singapore/story/anton-casey-fired-employer-crossinvest-asia-20140125

Vaynerchuk, G. (2009). Retrieved from YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNM9kA1bSHk