The PlanetRecruit Blog

The Importance of social media for IT professionals

One in five bosses reject candidates after seeing their Facebook profiles....... 

By Madeleine Field, FDM Group Recruitment Manager 

Madeleine is responsible for the FDM Academy events and recruitment teams. As well as overseeing recruitment operations for FDM Academy’s graduate programme worldwide, Madeleine also organises all corporate Academy presentations, workshops, seminars and graduate fairs.  

Last week, Eurocom Worldwide released their 2012 annual technology market survey, which found that one fifth of IT executives admitted to rejecting applicants on the basis of what they posted on social media websites. With the competitive state of the IT job market and the increasing number of employers looking at applicants’ profiles, it is more important than ever to maintain a level of professionalism across social media.

In this day and age the Internet is an integral part of our lives, and has forever altered the way we live and work….and the way we find work or it finds us. The worldwide domination of online platforms within the job-hunting market, which have overtaken the traditional paper CV has encouraged employers to look further than just educational and work experience backgrounds. Employers now want to know about you; your personality and your interests. We have all heard that a CV is your opportunity to sell yourself, now social media is your opportunity to highlight what you know, what you’re interested in, and what your stance is on a particular topic – it is your opportunity to brand and promote yourself.

According to the same survey, about 40 percent of employers look at an applicants’ social media profiles during the screening process with the figure expected to rise in the coming years. Facebook, Twitter and more recently the professional network, LinkedIn, are the three key social media networks to join as each harbour a different platform for you to showcase your strengths. Facebook allows you to show off your soft skills and personality; Twitter gives you the opportunity to listen to up to date news and become a source of information, and finally LinkedIn allows you to upload your CV and professionally interact with people in the technology industry.

These social media sites allow interaction with people you wouldn’t usually be able to get access to, from Account Managers to Sales Managers to CEOs. It goes without saying that IT candidates are expected to be savvy on these platforms so ensure that you effectively manage your online presence; as Mads Christensen, Network Director at Eurocom, accentuates; ‘every action leaves an indelible digital trail.’

Your profiles don’t have to let you down; it can also work in your favour. Ensure that you utilise social media to express your opinions, engage with debates, start discussion topics and connect with other professionals in IT. Become an online personality and start to connect and network efficiently and effectively with others, as this could improve your chances of getting hired. Remember – it’s good to be talked about and to be talked to.

So, if you promote and brand yourself correctly and network with sincerity, you could edge your way into employment.

If you're looking for new IT opportunities in the mobile sector, search and apply on PlanetRecruit

 

The Job of the Recruitment Futurologist

Being a futurologist has always struck me as an odd job, like a professional daydreamer or fantasist. Personal feelings aside, their musing makes for good copy in the tabloids. Recently I read a piece discussing the future of tablet computers, phones and social media suggesting that all of these would be combined into a single headset with a drop down visor over one of our eyes, which displays information about the person you are looking at based on the their social network profile.
 
The 'vision' was that you would be able to see people who have similar hobbies or pastimes, their relationship status so on. I'm not heavy on social networking but this whole thing just sounds strange to me. This said, it did occur to me that in the same way you could display your personal availability and other details, you could use your social network profile it to find a new job.

Maybe you could indicate your current role and willingness to be approached about new work in a floating bubble above your head, possibly even with a salary attached. For example: ‘Java Developer, Available, no less than £350 per day’. You might be doing your weekly shop and you get a tap on the shoulder from an IT Director on his weekly shop who then gives you his card and asks you to get in touch (perfect!); although there would probably be no such thing as business cards. Maybe you'd have to bump heads or something. Finding a job would be so easy. 
 

Find a Job Through Your Social Network

In such a competitive job market, job seekers, employers and employment agencies are continually looking for means to gain an advantage. Consequently, the methods and tools by which new talent is sourced and acquired are constantly evolving.

Following the emergence of social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, social networking has become an integral part of both our personal and professional lives. So what impact has the increased popularity of social networking sites made on those involved in the recruitment industry?

For those looking for work, social networking can provide a useful tool with which to market themselves to would-be employers.

The Social Limitations of Twitter

You could be forgiven for never having heard of the Dunbar Number, not least because it isn’t a specific number. But in 1998 the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar published ‘The Social Brain Hypothesis’, which suggested that human brains can only keep up with about 150 people at a time. That’s the Dunbar Number – about 150.

This number is consistently proven throughout history: Stone Age villages averaged about 150 inhabitants, just as modern villages do. The latest social model shown to follow the Dunbar number theory is Twitter.

Twitter users can easily build up a following of thousands and follow a similar number themselves; the social model places no limits on our social networks, enabling them to grow exponentially. But it would appear that the human brain is the bottleneck for this new technology.

Navigating the technology and applications market

Making sure that we meet the needs of our clients means that we are constantly keeping an eye on emerging technologies, staying on top of demand, so that when a new type of requirement materialises, we are in a position to respond and offer expert assistance. This does involve an element of guesswork and sometimes when you call heads it will come up tails from time to time.

We recently took such a plunge when we began providing specialist services to those looking to hire mobile application developers, specifically the development of new applications using the Android platform. Entering a new market takes time and money so it was with some satisfaction this week that I learnt that the number of Android mobiles has passed the number of iphones for the first time. Gartner research predicts that Android will account for almost 50 per cent of the smartphone market by the end of 2012, giving it an enormous lead on its competitors.

The market is ever more steadily moving towards applications and devices that can be used on the move. While we don’t yet have a credible rival to the iPad tablet, we are surely only a few upgrades away from having an iPad killer on the market, most likely running on Google's honeycomb platform.

Digital Fame

Google Books reportedly now contains over five million books. That’s 500 billion words covering over 500 years: a seriously impressive figure. But even more impressive is what you can do with 500 billion words – as long as they’re digitised.

The big change doesn’t come from the sheer mass of words and numbers but from the fact the text is stored in a computer, enabling quick and easy searches for words or phrases you’re interested in. If you’ve ever tried to find a particular quote in, say, ‘The Complete Works of Shakespeare’, then you’ll understand why this is a big deal. 

But digital books aren’t just a useful toy for English Literature students. Researchers have studied these five million books and counted the number of times words appear in them from 1800 to the year 2000, tracking how our use of word usage has changed in that period. So far, so academic.

A cautious peek into the future of social media recruitment

Using social networking sites – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter – to match jobseekers to jobs and vice versa has generated a lot of buzz, and not without good reason. But while social media will almost certainly change forever the way people go about searching for jobs, there seems to be real confusion as to how these tools can be used effectively.

Social media allows users to filter messages and contacts, providing a partial solution to the mountains of spam that have devalued email as a medium of communication. The idea seems to be that they can do the same for recruitment, too – filtering irrelevant content via social media sites.

RockMelt: The social web browser launches

If I could hand out an award for ‘Browser Least Likely To Be Used In The Workplace’, it would have to go to RockMelt. This is the next-gen web browser that combines the framework of Google Chrome with instant access to all your favourite social networks.

It's like a one-stop shop for all your virtual needs. I can't imagine your boss will be letting you install it anytime soon.

I discovered RockMelt on Twitter. It seemed that most of my friends had been receiving beta invitations to test the software long before I had even heard about it. And in any case, what exactly is one supposed to assume of a programme called RockMelt? Good luck getting that name to catch on.

Crowdsourcing: Employment 2.0?

Not simply another buzzword joining the ranks of Web 2.0, or ‘the Cloud’, crowdsourcing describes an innovative business model that has the potential to revolutionise the way certain types of work are carried out. Anthony Williams, co-author of ‘Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changed Everything’ sums it up like this: “For the first time millions of people can aggregate their talent and expertise … previously the assumption had been you had to create a company. Here is something completely different“.

The word was coined in 2006 in a Wired article entitled ‘The Rise of Crowdsourcing’, and has been adopted throughout the industry to describe the underlying approach employed by companies as large as Amazon, whose Mechanical Turk is growing in utility at a rate of knots.

It might be argued that the rise of crowdsourcing is a natural progression in light of the phenomenal popularity of websites that rely on user-generated content and social media. Sites such as YouTube, Wikipedia and Facebook primarily offer a medium, or platform, and have long relied on their users to add substance. It is not such a great leap to see how this approach could be extended to generate revenue, and services such as elancer demonstrated how successful the model could be long before the term became part of popular jargon.

30 CSS and Javascript Tabs Solutions

Tabs have been around for a long time. They are nothing new. But with so many sites (blogs, ecommerce sites, web apps…) needing to show as much content and navigation as possible, they have never been so relevant.

Tabs are the perfect web page tidying up solution for organising cluttered content in a space-limited web page. Separating content into tabs keeps everything nice and compact, clutter-free and the content is always at the ready should a user need it.

In this round-up from Speckyboy Design Magazine, we have a variety of easy to use modern tabs solutions, techniques, tutorials and plugins, most of them make use of a variety of Javscript libraries (MooTools, jQuery…), but you will also find some innovative pure CSS solutions as well.

Pure CSS Tabs Tecniques & Tutorials

Sweet Tabbed Navigation Bar using CSS3

Sweet Tabbed Navigation Bar using CSS3 →
Demo →