Online community theory, strategy, platform reviews and development

Tired of surfing the Craigslist gauntlet scrapping for gigs? Leverage online communities to land a real job. ..slacker!

Job board sites such as Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com have become commercial cesspools for recruiting agencies and auto-posting bots that repeatedly spatter worthless listings, in mass, in an attempt to poach job seekers and grow their own market worth.

The amount of seekers scouring a job board directly impacts the net worth and revenue of a job listing site, so the race is clear; get new seekers to sign up through lead gateways. What’s unclear is whether the greater percentage of junk listings come from infiltrating outside parties, or are the result of job boards themselves whoring virtual real estate. The effect is the same; missed opportunity, disconnected peers, and high user attrition.

The conversion of listing sites to signup gateways not only provides poor user experience, it strips the value from the recruiting intermediary who gets paid when positions are filled, the company who is looking to fill a position, and the seeker who is searching for a job. Lack of cohesion equates to diminished community and frustrated users.

So what’s a seeker to do? The last thing that you care about when seeking a career move is the business model of the tools you are trying to leverage to get the job! You simply have zero interest in filling out 62 required fields and submitting a new signup/membership application every time you click a job listing. The process makes an already arduous task even more labor intensive and discourages seekers from applying to multiple positions.

What if there was a better way? A way to utilize your connections, demonstrate merit and showcase your capabilities? By leveraging your social communities and increasing your personal visibility you can stand out from the drones and push your way into the spotlight of key decision makers. Here’s how:

Pimp your Profile, for Search

The top two ways your profile is going to be found are:

1. Major search (e.g. Google, Yahoo!, Bing)
2. Hosted search, or rather, the search on the site your profile/online resume is located on.

Calibrate terminology in your profile to where industry trends and your personal experience intersect. Seek out and incorporate buzz terms in your self-description, in previous roles you preformed, and most importantly, in the titles and descriptions of those positions.

Not sure what’s being talked about? Try pecking potential buzz terms into Tweet Volume.

Update your ‘Brick and Mortar’ Resume

I’m not talking about a profile resume or job board resume. I’m talking about the one that you would print and hand to someone in person. It can be hard to talk about yourself so, if you get stuck, don’t. Pull out all the stops, drop $150 and have somebody write it for you.

Make sure the formatting is tight and lock it down in .PDF so you know it will look the same when it is viewed on that crappy loaner laptop they let the temporary, in-house recruiter borrow.

Build Connections and Join Groups on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a fantastic professional web community, use it. Connections are collected on a transactional basis making them easy to accumulate.

While you’re at it, look me up: Nicholas Ramirez. You’ll be surprised how many people you already know that may be able to provide you with that key lead. Ask relevant colleagues for referrals and if need be, don’t be afraid to ask for a revision.

Applicant on LinkedIn groups:

Besides the community itself and other rich features that LinkedIn provides, there is one feature that stands out among all other – groups. LinkedIn has many groups, some started by individuals and some by companies. These groups are a community of people that are like minded, in similar situation or who share common problems and discuss within that group to seek solutions. As you can imagine, there are plenty of groups for job seekers online. After all, a platform that is considered to be one of the best job search tool has to have some amazing groups for job seekers.

Start a Professional Blog on Wordpress or Blogger

Start a free, professional blog and search optimize it for your name. Post a minimum of two times per week for freshness and pings.

Number one rule of blogging: Blogs are NOT Twitter! Nobody cares what you ate for breakfast, nobody wants to hear your pithy quips.

Number two rule of blogging: Keep it focused and on topic, that parts harder than it sounds. Blogs about everything are really about nothing.

It takes a little while to get into a pattern, but I will tell you this much. If there are two guys with the same credentials and experience, the guy with an industry relevant community voice will get the job.

Consider your Online Footprint

That’s awesome that you snagged your own name for a Facebook URL! Now it ranks in your personal namespace. Did you know your buddy Brent tagged you in a photo from Shawn’s bachelor party? You were passed out butt naked on the Foosball table and the guys painted a clown face on your ass cheeks with white chocolate and margarita salt, you could totally tell it’s you though. Get the point?

Going back to search, everyone, and I mean everyone, from the CIA to recruiters, to CEO’s of Fortune 100 companies uses major search engines to satisfy the basic question of “who is this person?” We naturally, along with our friends, tend to optimize for our own names whether we mean to or not. Localized data servers add proximity relevance.

With the anonymity of the web fading, make sure you know what ranks in your personal namespace before someone tells you.

Now go get a job…and cut your hair!

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