Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2011. The examples of high-profile contacts, such as Pablo Isla, then at the head of Inditex, and Emilio Botín, chairman of Banco Santander, who died in 2014, and the focus on Facebook and LinkedIn reflect that time.
In the past, companies chose their candidates by studying their CVs and then holding a face-to-face interview. Today, with the arrival of job portals, getting as far as an interview is a lottery (it’s already a lottery whether the HR manager ever sees your CV).
It is common knowledge, confirmed by HR managers themselves, that when they advertise a vacancy and it receives 900 applications, they rarely look at more than 100 CVs. Now the most active job seekers use social networks to look for work, and that is where social networks become either an opportunity or a death trap in the selection process.
You should know that once the HR department has its preferred candidates to call in for an interview, it is increasingly common to type the candidate’s full name into Google, and the results will usually show your profiles on whatever social networks you have joined. In other cases they go straight to your Facebook or LinkedIn profile, and not to find your best qualities but to look for possible flaws.
Depending on the job you are “bidding” for, a good network of contacts on social media will win you a few points. Mind you, the quality of those contacts is analyzed too, especially when the job is in management or sales. A candidate for an executive post who has 50 contacts including Pablo Isla (then at the head of Inditex) and Emilio Botín (chairman of Banco Santander) is not the same as one with 200 contacts, 180 of whom are 18-year-old girls. (There may be a reasonable explanation as far as we’re concerned, but not for HR.)
See also: Which brands have the most valuable fans on Facebook?
The links you share are analyzed in the same way, because they show which topics catch your attention, and, last but not least, they can reveal your political views. Let’s not kid ourselves: candidates are still turned down because of their politics or their sexual orientation. This will keep happening as long as selection is done by a person and not a machine.
Recruiters also look for those Friday and Saturday night photos, where a single picture of you drunk can compromise your personal image, and with it your personal brand and the brand of your future employer.
It should be said that not every company spends time analyzing social networks, but you should know that they can.
Look after your reputation
Experts recommend taking part in social networks and having your own “yourname.com” (your personal brand), as long as it is carefully looked after and thought through, because a company’s reputation is increasingly built by its own employees.
You need to devote time to your personal image: be active but cautious, be open but don’t share too much of your private life with the general public. The moment you use a social network, your reputation is no longer yours; it is whatever others choose to grant you. That is why companies know they need people on their staff who are relevant, unproblematic and uncontroversial, and ideally discreet about sensitive topics.
Going back to where we started, and knowing how hard it will be to get your CV read at all: once they look into your personal brand, make sure they find no reason to rule you out.
When it comes to getting a job, the race isn’t always won by the most competent candidate, but by the smartest one: the one who knows how to win over the recruiting department.
Further reading
- Best-paid professionals in times of crisis
- Public employment in the eye of the storm
- Virtual work: the future of companies?
Featured image: Amtec Photos, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
