How to Facebook Your Way to a New Job! Some handy tips from George Penman of Evergrad…

It was once the case that LinkedIn was for your professional life and Facebook was for your personal life (and Twitter was for shouting self-aggrandising bite-sized statements at strangers) However, Facebook is now closing the gap with LinkedIn in the battle to get you into a job. Indeed it may come as no surprise to learn that one in seven minutes spent online by people around the world is on Facebook. This translates to an average of 423 minutes a month and when you compare this to 15 minutes a month spent on LinkedIn and 25 minutes per month spent on Twitter, you can see why businesses, both large and small, are taking recruitment on Facebook more seriously.

Allied to this, we live in a world where the increase in the number of educated graduates is outstripping the number of graduate level vacancies available for them. Owing to this competitiveness and greater familiarity with social media platforms on the part of employers, microscopic scrutiny of your digital life is increasingly commonplace and your social media presence can be a banana skin or a boon. These questions therefore need to be asked: how to leverage Facebook to find the best job and how to put your best digital foot forward? With all this in mind, here are some handy tips on how to make the most of Facebook during your job hunt:

Search for friends who work within the companies that you would like to work for

You would be surprised how many companies run a referral system that your friends can make use of to line their own pockets and get you a job at the same time. I can recall a friend desperately trying to butter me up to join the company he was working for; this was for ostensibly altruistic reasons but it turned out that a £1,500 referral reward by the company was quite an incentive for him to pass the job my way.

Make sure that you list as much professional information as possible.

Facebook is a late entrant to the recruitment game but last year deftly rolled out its skills tagging system which you should make the most of. Find it in your Facebook profile’s “About” section under the “Work and Education” heading and make sure that you tag all of the skills you could possibly claim to possess.

Privacy settings are a must.

Even if you are not the most technically savvy millennial around, there is still no excuse for having compromising material on your Facebook profile. A little profile spring cleaning may be in order: de-tag the particularly squiffy photos, delete inappropriate comments on your wall and make sure that everything that is publically viewable on your profile is inoffensive to even the most sensitive of souls.

Get really creative and pay to serve an advert on Facebook to recruiters at your target organisation.

Doing this illustrates that you are willing to go the extra mile, think outside of the box or whatever other cliché you like. It’s inexpensive too, having recently trialled this way of gaining the attention of hiring managers, we worked out that you can have your advert opened by recruiters through Facebook for as little as 15p. Simply click “create advert” in your top right navigation menu and then target the recipients by inputting these criteria: the city of company you want to work for, users over age of 25 and users who work at your target company.

George Penman works at graduate recruitment platform, Evergrad, which places graduates exclusively into smaller businesses in the UK. Follow George on Twitter too if you fancy!