How to use Twitter in your job search
Twitter can often be overlooked as a good place to find your next job opportunity. Twitter’s reputation can be sometimes criticised because of the memes, bad jokes and sometimes over aggressive users tweeting about celebrities. However, once you look past the negatives, there can be some real potential for job seeking on this platform. You just have to have the right resources and look at it from a new angle. Social media platforms are filled with companies and recruiters looking for new hires, it’s your job to go looking for them.
Start by making your profile look more professional
If you’re going to be contacting potential employers, you want your profile to look appropriate. You want to have an image that you would be happy for them to see. This may be a simple headshot, or something similar to what you may use on your LinkedIn profile. You also want your Bio to be simple and effective. You only have 160 characters to work with, so it’s best not to try and squeeze too much information in. You can include your job title and a little bit about you, keep it short and simple.
If you have been using your Twitter account for years already, you may want to consider deleting your previous tweets. If you started your account when you were 15, maybe think twice about using this profile in the first place. It’s best to wipe your profile and start from scratch, or just create a new one. You don’t want recruiters looking through your twitter to find an embarrassing tweet you forgot to delete from 10 years ago. Think about all of this before you take your profile off private and start following companies.
Build the right network
For Twitter to work for you, you need to have built the right network. You want to search for and follow businesses that you would be interested in working for. Often, companies have specific profiles for their job vacancies. For example, MBDA have ‘@MBDAcareers’. After planning who you would like to follow, double check if they have a separate account for their recruitment teams.
If you are interested in working with recruitment consultants, many of them have social media, so it may be worth looking for them and giving them a follow as well. Another useful feature of Twitter is the direct messaging service. Once you have followed a recruitment consultant or their organisation, you can message them with details of what you are looking for. This can help you get in touch with the right people.
It is also good to follow and connect with other professionals in your field. Having these people on your news feed can be very useful to your job search and you may learn something new in the process as well. Other engineers may tweet daily news, information from their field of work and other interesting information. It’s a good tip to keep you up-to-date and informed, as well as using it as a platform to get involved in conversation.
Interact
You want to be active on Twitter in order to get a response. People you have followed want to see that you are communicating with your network and you are active in your field of work. It is a good idea to log-in on a daily basis so you can catch up with messages, check follows and see if careers pages have been updated. If a recruitment consultant is trying to get in contact, you don’t want to miss the opportunity. It is also more likely that you will get responses if they see your profile is active. They are less likely to get in touch if your last tweet was a year ago. Think about your online presence and what you can do to improve it.
Search function
The search function on Twitter can be very useful. It can be used to find any tweet that has used a specific hashtag. For example, if you are looking for tweets that have used phrases such as, #jobvacancy or #engineeringcareers, you can use the search bar, type in your phrase or phrases, and it will pull up the most recent tweets that include your search term. This can be a quick and easy way of finding vacancies and new businesses to follow.
The search function also automatically finds trends that are tailored to you. When you are not looking for jobs, you can still use Twitter to catch up on any engineering news you may have missed. Use this to interact with your network, tweet news you find interesting and it may start up a conversation.
Watch what you post
Having a Twitter profile that you use for job searching, shouldn’t be used for personal tweets. Twitter can sometimes be seen as an unprofessional platform, there are a lot of users that use it for jokes and posting images etc. However, you need to make sure that if you are connecting to employers, you keep a neutral tone. It may also be a good idea to make sure that your personal account is private, so you can control who see’s your content.
Twitter can be used for more than just memes and political rants. If you present your profile correctly it can be a great professional space to find vacancies and connect with potential employers. If you are still not sold, you can link your Twitter profile to your LinkedIn page as well, to give the employers a little more information about you as a professional. You can pin a tweet to your profile, so it is the first thing visitors can see when they are re-directed to your page – have this as a link to your LinkedIn.
There are many ways to interact with businesses on Twitter, keep active and make sure you are also talking to other professionals. You never know, Twitter may bring you your ideal job role. If you are actively looking for your next engineering role, follow @EandTJ for a range of the latest job vacancies.