The Essential Trio

There are 3 essential social networks that you MUST be on if you are on the hunt for a job. One for business information, another because its packed with personal information, and one for very relevant, up to date info. As you uncover names and leads you can usually find just about all of them on one of these 3 sites.

*LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) - Social network for business professionals.

- Connect with all of your email contacts, co-workers, ex co-workers and classmates. LinkedIn allows you to display your skill set / work history / and interests for other professionals to view (several of which being recruiters.)

- Search by zip code, city, or state to find certain types of people, or companies within an industry.

*Facebook (www.facebook.com) - Popular social network for the younger crowd.

- Connect to all the same people as LinkedIn, except now you get to see things like their birthday, religion, favorite books, bands, movies, quotes, etc.

- Use the "Profile Search" to look at different companies in your network and find contacts to call regarding a job.

- Check out http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics to see some interesting facts about Facebook.

*Twitter (www.twitter.com) Most popular & most valuable.

- Twitter is "Micro blogging" so basically you find people you either know or want to know and "follow" them. After you begin following them you will start receiving updates like "@JIM IS AT THE WEB CONFERENCE DOWNTOWN CHICAGO" or a lot of times people will post links.

- For you job seekers, Many companies use Twitter for branding and to build a sense of closeness with their customers or client base. I've noticed that several people within companies who are involved in the staffing process will post about job openings and the types of people they are looking for like "@JOE LOOKING FOR JAVA DEVELOPERS FOR CHICAGO OFFICE" you can then click on Joe's profile and In most cases find out his name or get a link to his website.

- So how do you look through all of the Twitter updates and find jobs? I've found a site called www.monitter.com and it monitors every update from every twitter user. It lets you filter the updates by entering a zip code and selecting a mile radius to search within. You then can select 3 keywords and if anyone within in your radius writes on Twitter or (tweets) your keyword, it shows up on your screen. For example, If you're a .NET guy with a lot of back end and SQL experience. You could set up the three columns ".NET" "Back end" "SQL" -- Now anyone within lets say 40 miles of "60606" who writes anything about those 3 things you will see it
immediately as it happens.