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Recently, Canadian recruitment professionals Head2Head in partnership with LinkedIn performed an informal survey. They asked recruiters to tell them how they found candidates. The results were quite telling.

In short, 69% of Canadian recruiters surveyed use LinkedIn for recruiting and 44% use Facebook to find and investigate candidates. A small percentage of recruiters use other online venues as well including blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Craigslist to mention a few.

Clearly, there has been a noticeable shift in our marketplace. Recruiters are moving away from spending money to post jobs on job boards. This is because the time and energy that it takes to weed out undesirable candidates has increased in leaps and bounds.

In the early days of the Internet, one effective posting produced a manageable number of corresponding resumes. Now, in some cases, hundreds of resumes flood the recruiter and the work required to find one good candidate is no longer worth the effort. Cyberspace has allowed a much more interesting and cost effective way to find the best candidates – by actively mining for them.

So, what does this mean for you? Rather than spending most of your valuable job search time seeking out jobs, you should be building and managing your online presence. It is now clear that your visibility is critical to your short-term goal of finding a role, but also your long-term career success.

If you want to cultivate your career prospects, then you should not treat social networking sites as entertainment. Rather, you should be treating every activity online as a potential career maker or breaker.

Step 1- Clean up your internet presence
Start by eliminating bad press. Go through your social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and remove all inappropriate content. Be assured that if you don’t, your folly will come back to bite you during any background checking process.

Step 2- Create your brand identity
Flesh out your value proposition – the compelling message that you will be delivering to recruiters. This should be the same brand message as you deliver in your resume and other supporting career documents. If you create a memorable picture that sets you apart from the competition, you will be found and selected.

Step 3- Implement your online strategy
As an executive, it is in your best interest to develop and execute an effective online strategy. To market yourself on the internet, you must deliver a consistent brand message. Leverage sites like LinkedIn, VisualCV, Plaxo, and Twitter to your benefit.
 
According to Head2Head, 77% of the Canadian recruiters they surveyed said that online recruiting improved their ability to connect to passive candidates. Don’t you want to be recruited too?

If you need help in cleaning up, creating, and implementing your online strategy, Graham Management Group provides a comprehensive Online Networking Program to help you.

Thank you for reading my blog! Please email me if you spot any errors in this post.