Much has been said lately about the value of social media to job seekers. Since you’re reading a blog post about it, which you probably learned about from a post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or BrazenCareerist, the value of social media should be obvious. It is likely what brought you here.

So let’s cut to the chase: You know social networking can be valuable, but you just aren’t sure how to do it the right way. Here are 5 great posts that can help you figure some of this out.

Take 5:

• How to Use Social Media in Your Job Search: Using LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to Job Search by Rachel Levy gives a great overview of ways to use these tools, and your blog.
• 7 Secrets to Getting Your Next Job Using Social Media by Dan Schawbel gives some unique ways to use search engines, bl ogs, LinkedIn, Facebook, Video Resumes and your blog/rss subscriptions to stay on task, monitor your personal brand, an d get connected during your job search.
• This article about a panel presentation by the Sacramento Social Media Club about using Facebook and Twitter for your job search gives some simple but good advice from panelists. I also like the idea of social media clubs. If you have one in your area, this could be a great place to find people who could help you understand ways to use social media to enhance your job search and career.
• The Social Media Commando offers 10 tips on using Social Media in your job search
  
• Alison Doyle offers a good overview of networking sites at her About.Com page. Alison is a great person to follow, and her articles on About.Com are very much resource-packed. I visit often and always learn something.

And listen in the morning:

I am doing a BlogTalkRadio show on using social media in your job search tomorrow (Friday) at 11 a.m. My guest host will be Mallory Bower, Assistant Director of Career Services at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. Mallory writes periodically for my other site, HigherEdLifeCoach.Com, and will have some articles on this site soon, as well. Our guests will include some of Mallory’s colleagues at UNCP, including Mike Severy, Director of Student Involvement and Leadership, and newly hired Assistant Director Becca Fick. Twitter was integral to posting the job, getting candidates and to Fick’s eventual hiring. Mike and Becca wrote great posts on their perspectives on using Twitter in the job search. Mike’s post, on the Student Affairs Collaborative Blog, can be found here, and Becca’s guest post at On the Go with Ed Cabellon can be found here.

We’ll also revisit last week’s discussion on “purpose” and what it means to people working in higher education. Plus news, events and perspectives of note in the higher ed/student affairs world. Show is scheduled for 90 minutes to allow call-ins, discussion, etc., but may end after an hour or so.

You can listen to the show by following this link. And you can call in live to ask questions during the interview to (347) 989-005 or via Skype from the show page. (I’ve never really done that, but it is supposedly possible. Someone should give it a try, and let me know how it works!) Please listen in and share your questions and comments. After the show, you can call in and record your comments to my GoogleVoice comment line, 706-352-9467. (352-WINS) and I may play them on the air in a future episode.

So please check out these links, think about how you might use social media to advance your job search and career, and call me in the morning.

In my last post, I gave somewhat of an overview of major placement conferences for candidates in Student Affairs. In this post I hope to share a few tips for all you Higher Education/Student Affairs job searchers out there who are attending a placement conference this season.

During my 15-year career in Student Affairs, I was on both sides of the interview table at placement conferences, and can offer you some perspectives that will hopefully set you at ease and help you be more confident, and more prepared.

Save your money now. These things can get expensive!

• Ask your employer if professional development funds can be spent to attend a placement conference. For many institutions, the answer will be “no,” and you shouldn’t be surprised or offended by this. It’s just where many employers draw the line in the sand. Institutions give PD money to help their employees learn new skills and enhance their skills sets, but it’s not realistic to expect your current employer to help you find a new or better job.

• Find a roommate (or two or three) to share lodging expenses. The nightly rates at convention hotels are usually pretty moderate. (For example, nightly rates at preferred hotels for this year’s ACPA convention range from $199/night for a single room to $259 a night for a quad.) And don’t forget about parking, which will probably be in the $35/$40 per night range, or taxis and shuttle service to and from the airport if you are not driving in.
• If you have your own transportation, and can find a less expensive non-conference hotel near public transit, then drive in, or take the bus, and save some money.
• Take advantage of free in-room coffee and free continental breakfasts (if your hotel has them). It’s also easier than you might think to find yourself skipping breakfasts, or unwilling to fight the teeming throngs trying to get breakfast at the same time. It’s also a good idea to bring snacks to your room, in case you are pressed for time and need to eat and run.
• Bring a water bottle and refill it when you can rather than buying drinks at hotel/convention center prices.

Have all your ducks in a row before you get there.

• Make sure your resume is impeccably written, targeted toward the positions you hope to apply for, grammatically correct, well laid-out, and easy to read. Placement centers will give you a candidate number. Make sure it is on your resume and that all pages stay together. Staples are fine at a placement center. Take a stapler and use it. When an interviewer has a huge pile of resumes and interview forms and brochures and giveaways to deal with, the last thing they want to do is spend their time searching a pile of loose papers for one errant page of your resume that got separated from the rest, because your paper clip slipped off.
• Speaking of candidate numbers, many candidates these days make personalized message to employer forms that give a brief statement of interest, and leave room for the candidate to write in the employer number and the posting number on the form. If you do make your own, consider using colored paper. It stands out. As a conference interviewer, I always liked these, as long as messages were brief and concise. They also helped me find a candidate’s packet more easily.
• Make contact ahead of time with potential employers about listings posted before the conference. Ask to pre-arrange an interview for your position of interest. Many employers pre-arrange a significant number of their interviews when possible.
• Make sure all your references have been prepped about your goals for the placement exchange, any positions you are planning to apply for, and your reasons for applying for certain types of positions.

Be on Your Best Behavior. At All Times!

• It won’t matter how you are dressed or how you interview if you make an ass out of yourself in some other way. Some do’s and don’ts:

• Do:
  • Come prepared for each interview
  • Be friendly to the interviewers and to other candidates
  • Stay positive
  • Thank your interviewers for their time at the end of the interview
  • Network with other candidates and encourage them in their job search
  • Use the preparation table areas to organize your thoughts and your materials
  • Wait a few minutes if the interviewer is running late. Since most interviews run about 30 minutes, you should feel free to go after 10 minutes. But these are very busy days and people do get off-course. If you have back-to-back interviews, let the interviewer know.

  Don’t:

  • Schedule back-to-back interviews (if you can help it). You’ll need time to get from one place to another and you will periodically need a break.
  • Badmouth, make fun of, or make rude comments about an interviewer, a university, another candidate, your boss, your current employer, or basically, anyone. This means in the placement center, the hotel, the lobby bar, the McDonald’s across the street…wherever. If you need to vent or talk out frustrations, go to your hotel room and talk with your conference roommates or call a friend or family member on the phone. For everyone else, act like it’s raining daisies and nothing could be finer.
  • Stay in the placement center all day (especially if you are not especially busy at some given time with interviews.) This can lead you to think too much, stress out, and get down on yourself. You will need fresh air and walking-around time. Take it.
  • Flirt with your interviewer or other candidates, make inappropriate jokes or off-color comments, or go on and on and on about how many top scholars you know in the field. It’s boorish behavior and it will count against you in the eyes of many employers.
  • Expect to leave the placement center with a job in hand. Most universities just don’t work that way. There are human resource guidelines to follow, and many student-services positions really like to involve students, colleagues in related departments, and upper administrators in their selection processes, and it’s unlikely that all of these parties will be represented on the interview team.

Learn Something!

• If the placement center is part of a longer conference with professional development sessions, go to some! They are great places to network, you might learn something new that leads you to explore additional opportunities, and you will need a break from the placement center.
• If you have the option of talking about your career or some topic of interest with more experienced professionals, do it. Sometimes, these opportunities come up in sessions. Sometimes, they come up on the sidewalk, in a restaurant or at a volunteer post.

Volunteer!

• Volunteering is a great way to get informal opportunities for networking, to learn how the conference is organized, and to be of service to other candidates.
• It’s also fun. Did I mention that you are likely to need a break from interviewing? This is one way to take a break but depending on what you volunteer for, you may end up volunteering in the placement center. Just be sure that you are doing it during an actual opening in your interview schedule!

Best of luck to everyone interviewing this season!

There’s a lot of talk in marketing about “branding,” but it’s also useful to look at your job search in a similar light. After all, you are selling your most important product: yourself. For your consideration, here are five articles that explore the concept of personal branding in the job search.

1. Kristi Daeda, a Success Coach and Creator of the Career Adventure blog, has many good articles on her own blog, and I regularly read her articles and follow her on Twitter. She offers a great perspectives on how to get feedback from others about your personal brand in an article she wrote for  another site, Brand Camp University. Personal branding: It’s not what you say.
   
2. Brand-Yourself.com has a great 10-step Personal Branding Worksheet to help you define “your unique value proposition.”
3. There’s a great article at BrazenCareerist.com by Ryan Stephens on why you should “Stay true to your personal brand” during your job search.
4. The Personal Branding Blog is a top resource on the topic of personal branding. Spearheaded by Dan Schawbel, the Author of Me 2.0, it has many articles,  interviews and tips to help you build you brand. It was hard picking an article to highlight because there are so many good ones, but I settled on “Brand yourself for the job you want in three years” by Katie Konrath.
5. Career Rocketeer has a great article exploring the differences between making an effective presentation and effectively conveying your character before, during and after the interview.

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Today’s Higher Ed professionals often feel like dinosaurs, in comparison to their students, who are connected 24-7-365 to each other and just about everyone else via various social media tools and websites. Here are five resources on the web to help you get up to speed on social media.

Social Media Can both Connect and Confuse!

• Social Media in Plain English on the CommonCraft show is an entertaining video that explains social media through the use of hand-drawn images and a story about people in a small town that love ice cream.
• 7 Tips for Sharing Articles on Twitter by the Interview Angel gives some great and simple techniques for getting read and re-tweeted.
• Are Social Networks making students more narcissistic? is a great article on USA Today from August 2009.
• What you shouldn’t (and should) worry about with social media on the Brand-Yourself blog is good advice for anyone on the basic etiquette of social media and its perils.
• 100 Tips, Tools and Resources for Teaching Students about Social Media from the TeachingDegree.Org blog is an awesome set of resources and links on all sorts of social media topics in education.

This week, I’ll wander away a bit from higher ed-specific sites and concentrate on careers.  Here are five links to sites and articles with great career advice and perspectives. Enjoy!

My Nine Careers: Lessons Learned Career coach Marty Nemko shares his meandering career path and some simple lessons he took away from them.

Going Above and Beyond: Distinguishing Yourself as a Job Seeker What can you learn about going the extra mile from buying a laptop at Staples.

Screw Your Career Path, Live Your Story by Jason Seiden is a thought-provoking piece that may help shift your thinking about careers.

The Ladders has a great article about how Volunteering can pay off in your job search.

and for some basic interview advice, slanted toward working in student affairs. . . here’s a post I wrote for the Student Affairs Collaborative Blog last April… “They Wouldn’t Listen to the Fact that I was a Genius: 20 Ways to Blow Your On-Campus Interview.”

If you have good articles or resources worth sharing, e-mail me at sean@higheredcareercoach.com and I may share in a future edition of Take 5.

Thanks for dropping by.