Career Development

We’ve spent a significant amount of time together discussing how best to decide what type of job you want, how to craft your resume and how to go about landing an interview. It’s only logical that our next topic is the interview itself, right? Well, almost. You wouldn’t walk into a final exam or a big board meeting unprepared, would you? An interview is a test, and one where there is no makeup or retakes. A botched interview could mean a lost opportunity and if there is one thing that I’ve learned over the few several years as well as the course of this blog, it is this: a good employee/student does their homework ahead of time!

Lately we’ve been talking about how social media is an extremely powerful tool that you can should be using to help you in your job search. We’ve covered the importance of being visible and monitoring your online personae, using social media sites to network your way to a job and how to stay on top of job openings and opportunities as they are posted. Surely that’s enough, right? What more can you expect from social media?

I’ve been traveling recently. A man named Terry sat next to me on my first flight. He was one of those extremely chatty individuals and, being a generally polite person, I responded in kind. Upon hearing that I have an interest in social media, he shared with me his story. Several years ago, Terry quit his job and went on a four-month sailing trip around Central America. When he got back from his hiatus, he found seven serious job leads on his LinkedIn account; he found one to his liking and started his new position two weeks later. Terry wasn’t actively searching for a job during this time, nor was he even advertising that he needed a new job. I found this story fascinating. Not only is it a testimonial to the power of social media networking, but it is also highly unlikely to happen in today’s market.