Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Find a Job via Twitter

8 Tips to Help You Find a Job on Twitter

twitter-job-searchWhen many people think of Twitter, they think of people “tweeting” about their lunch, pictures of cats, or meaningless minutiae from their day.
In reality, however, many industry professionals use Twitter not only as an informational resource, but as a recruiting resource. As one of the most prominent and widely-used social media platforms on the Internet, Twitter has the potential to be a powerful tool in your next job search.
So how can you find a job on Twitter? Does job hunting on Twitter really work? Here are a few tips that could put you on the path to finding your dream job through the power of social media.

Be Professional

When putting together your Twitter profile, put your best foot forward and conduct yourself like a professional as this will help you find a job through Twitter. Don’t put rude or controversial statements in your profile bio, and be mindful of what you share, say, and retweet.
Many employers are out there looking for the right talent and culture for their company so keep this in mind when summing up your words on Twitter.

Be Yourself

While you should conduct yourself in a professional manner, it’s also important to come across as genuine. Use your own photo in your Twitter profile, not a picture of a celebrity or a cartoon. Tweet what interests you, and don’t try to present yourself as someone (or something) you’re not. Let potential employers see who you really are.

Become an Expert

Twitter is a great opportunity to share your expertise with others. If you have a blog, post links to your most recent entries (without excessively “spamming”). Answer questions and use what you know to help others. It might just get you some attention from people who are looking to work with someone just like you.
If you have a variety of skills, promote these through hash tags; spread the word of your great abilities and this may lead you to your next career path or internship.

Be an Original

When trying to establish a presence on Twitter to gain a job, don’t be afraid to re-share the work of others — but be sure to create and share content of your own. Putting together an insightful blog post, a useful infographic, or even an informative or useful photo or illustration can go a long way toward establishing you as someone interesting who others want to follow and hire. Every piece of original content is another brick in the road toward landing a job through Twitter.

Be Patient

Getting attention takes time. Build your audience slowly. It may take months or longer for you to get any kind of significant following on Twitter. Don’t be resentful of the success of others, and above all, don’t spam or fall prey to “purchasing” followers through services that offer thousands of followers for a price. A massive number of false followers are easily identifiable, and the repercussions can last much longer than the followers themselves (as Twitter regularly sweeps out false accounts).

Use the Tools

The sheer amount of information Twitter has on hand can be staggering. In fact, presenting lots of information in a short time is what Twitter does best — so learn how to manage it.
Software applications like Tweetdeck allow users to monitor search results on Twitter, filter feeds by lists or subjects, and otherwise tweak their Twitter experience for maximum effectiveness. Watch the search filters for possible job openings in your field, or openings to create opportunity for yourself.

Follow the Right People

If you’re serious about finding work on Twitter, then you’ll want to follow professionals in your industry. Don’t bog down your feed with too many celebrities, joke accounts, and other personalities you’ll never engage with.

Engage

Once you’ve gotten a foothold on social media, it’s time to take some chances. Engage with people in the industry you want to connect with — even if you feel you have no business doing so. Don’t just hit them with an empty “hello”. Ask a question. Start a discussion. Get a dialogue going. Don’t take it personally if you don’t get a reply — information moves fast on Twitter, and is easily missed. Keep trying, and be persistent without being obnoxious.
These tips are sure to help your job search… and land a job on Twitter. Start today!

Posted on  by Jenny Ann Beswick

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Welcome Recent Graduates

-by Mike Montario


It is with great pride that I welcome you to the workforce. I realize many of you are still preparing for finals. Getting your portfolios together. Preparing oral defenses. That sort of thing. But I’m guessing that right below the surface of those immediate and real concerns, the anxiety of what comes next may have started to take hold.
It’s cool. I am here to help you. I am a job creator. And contrary to what you may have been told in school, you are about to enter a market awash in opportunity. Especially if you’re entering the technology and interactive design market. Which doesn’t mean that you’re not gonna have to go out there and nail an interview—because you will. So if you’ll give me a few minutes of your precious time I have a few tips that may help you land the job of your dreams.

1. Get your house in order

Don’t even think about looking for a job without an online presence. If you’re a designer you better have an online portfolio. If you’re a developer, show me some code samples. And don’t just show me your work is pretty, describe what problems you were solving.
And as much as I hate to say this, get a LinkedIn profile. Otherwise, prospective employers are gonna look at your Facebook page, which should be cleaned up but not to the point where it’s obvious you’ve cleaned it up. Leave a beer bong shot or two.
Buy a decent outfit to interview in. Tights aren’t pants and flip flops aren’t shoes.

2. Where are these jobs at, fool?

Good question. There are a few excellent job boards you should get familiar with. Start with Authentic Jobs and 37 Signals Job Board. Stay away from Craigslist and stuff like that, they’re shit shows for stuff like this.

3. Get names

When you finally find a job you want to apply for do some research. Find out the name of the person who’ll be receiving your email. Hint: They’re not called Hiring Manager. (Also, if you assume the hiring manager is a man, you suck.) If it’s a small shop, just address it to the principal by name. Don’t address your letter to the dog, even if the company is stupid enough to list a dog on their website with the rest of the staff.

4. Even better, network

“Networking” is kind of a gross word. It’s true. But, nepotism is real and making those connections will serve you throughout the duration of your career. Hiring can feel like an exhausting crapshoot. People hire their friends and their friends’ friends before they start picking random strangers from the jobs@company.com inbox. Tell everyone you know what sort of job you are looking for and ask for introductions to anyone they know who works in your desired field. Then, when one of these people is asked “Hey, do you know anyone looking for a job?” your name will come up.
You can go to a “networking mixer” if you like drinking with sad people in uncomfortable clothes, but it won’t be nearly as effective as working your existing friends and relatives. Even your professors. They had dreams once.

5. No one wants to read your cover letter

Write a good email. The goal of the email is to get an in-person interview. Explain why you’re qualified. Explain what you’d bring to the job. Sound genuinely excited about this new field you’re entering! Do not apologize for your lack of experience. It’ll be obvious when you tell me you’ve just graduated from college. Don’t be overly familiar, no matter how “wacky” you’ve heard the workplace is. You’re not applying to be anyone’s friend. The fact that you can write a solid, straight-forward email that gets right to the point and maybe shows just a glimmer of personality goes a long way.
Put the email in the body of the email. Plain text formatting. Do not attach your letter to the email. I’m not going to open any of those attachments anyway, and I’m certainly not going to open them when I’ve asked you not to attach anything. I may click the link to your website. If your email was well-written.
Also, I’ve never read a resumé in my life. But if you insist on giving me one, don’t lead with “Photoshop” as a skill. Tell me you know how to combine typefaces and have a solid understanding of color theory. That’s a skill.

6. Prepare for the interview

You got an interview? Fantastic. Time to prepare. Find out as much about the company you’re applying at as possible. Google them. Read their site. Get familiar with the type of work they do and who they do it for.
Prepare questions for them. At some point during the interview you’ll be asked “Do you have any questions for us?” You should have some.
“What’s it like to work here?” is a dumb question. “I notice a lot of your work is in editorial; do you worry about the economics of that market?” gets you a second interview.

7. Dress the part, be the part

There is a school of thought that says your brilliance will shine through even if you’re wearing a ratty hoodie and a stained t-shirt. It’s stupid. You’re gonna get some graduation money. Spend it on some decent clothes to wear to your interview. Your Flickr-stalking/research should tell you whether a suit will impress or terrify your prospective employers.
Don’t hug any of your interviewers. Before or after.

8. Not to be a self-serving douchebag, but…

Read my book. I wrote it just for you. It’s got a ton of good lessons that will guide you through your career. Trust me on this. It’s $18.00.

9. Don’t apply to Facebook

Seriously, do you think so little of the sacrifice your parents made sending you to college that you’re willing to just throw your life away?

Life Lessons in Fighting the Culture of Bullshit - Jon Lovett


This item has been excerpted from the prepared Commencement Address to the graduates of Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., on May 18, 2013.
I recently turned thirty, which I know seems like a generation away to those of you graduating this morning. But it's more than just the worst. Thirty is a year where you're left straddling two worlds. One foot stands in the world of the young, among the bright eager minds and supple bodies of students like you. And the other foot stands in the world of the grey and decrepit; the ancient shapes of your professors and parents; their dulling senses; their craggily, wizened faces.

And by the way, congratulations parents! This is your day too.
But what it means is that I am in a position to talk about life after college -- as someone who just lived through it. For example, do you remember how your elementary school felt enormous? But then when you returned years later, you were amazed by how small it actually was? In time, your chosen professions will feel exactly the same way. That is not to say that you won't have almost unlimited opportunities. But it is to say that if you sleep with someone who works in your industry, just be aware that you're going to bump into that person at meetings and conferences and birthday parties for the rest of your life. I literally had to leave politics.

Yeah, we're going to talk about it. Your love is a delicate flower.
So, I'm going to skip the platitudes, OK? I want this to be a practical commencement address. And I'm going to do my best to tell the truth -- even when it's uncomfortable to say, even when I probably shouldn't say it. Because you're already swimming in half-truths, in people telling you what they think you want to hear. And in this next phase of your life, I promise you, you will encounter more.
I should preface this by saying that the problem I am going to describe involves a bad word -- not the worst word, but a bad word -- though I've made sure that I only have to say it now and then one more time at the end. So if you want to distract any little kids for a second, please do so. One of the greatest threats we face is, simply put, bullshit. We are drowning it. We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social media's imitation of human connection; in legalese and corporate double-speak. It infects every facet of public life, corrupting our discourse, wrecking our trust in major institutions, lowering our standards for the truth, making it harder to achieve anything.

And it wends its way into our private lives as well, changing even how we interact with one another: the way casual acquaintances will say "I love you"; the way we describe whatever thing as "the best thing ever"; the way we are blurring the lines between friends and strangers. And we know that. There have been books written about the proliferation of malarkey, empty talk, baloney, claptrap, hot air, balderdash, bunk. One book was aptly named "Your Call is Important to Us."

But this is not only a challenge to our society; it's a challenge we all face as individuals. Life tests our willingness, in ways large and small, to tell the truth. And I believe that so much of your future and our collective future depends on your doing so. So I'm going to give you three honest, practical lessons about cutting the BS.

Number one: Don't cover for your inexperience. You are smart, talented, educated, conscientious, untainted by the mistakes and conventional wisdom of the past. But you are also very annoying. Because there is a lot that you don't know that you don't know. Your parents are nodding. You've been annoying them for years. Why do you think they paid for college? So that you might finally, at long last, annoy someone else. And now your professors are nodding.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "Yeah, this should definitely be in 3D."
No, what he said was, "[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." That's what you have to do: you have to be confident in your potential, and aware of your inexperience. And that's really tough. There are moments when you'll have a different point of view because you're a fresh set of eyes; because you don't care how it's been done before; because you're sharp and creative; because there is another way, a better way. But there will also be moments when you have a different point of view because you're wrong, because you're 23 and you should shut up and listen to somebody who's been around the block.

The old people are nodding again.
It's hard to tell the difference. Me, I love getting this one wrong. I got it wrong a ton when I started out as a speechwriter to Hillary Clinton. I got it wrong again when I became a presidential speechwriter. I worked on one speech about the financial system that caused the Dow to drop like 200 points. So that speech could have been better, probably.
Just this past year, I faced this same dilemma, co-creating a show on NBC. It's called 1600 Penn, and while you may have heard of it, based on the ratings, you almost certainly didn't see it. Though, it did recently make some headlines... when it was cancelled. I had never so much as a written a line of dialogue before I wrote this show. But I'm working with directors and writers and executives with years and years of experience in the biz. We call it the biz.
I'll always cringe remembering those little embarrassing moments when I said something dumb on a conference call, when my inexperience poked through, when I should have been more solicitous of the judgment of those around me. They're a reminder that it's not mutually exclusive to be confident and humble; to be skeptical and eager to learn.
But there is another side to this coin, which brings me to lesson number two: Sometimes you're going to be inexperienced, naïve, untested and totally right. And then, in those moments, you have to make a choice: is this a time to speak up, or hang back? I worked for then-Senator Clinton during her campaign for president -- and I believed in her, still do. But I vividly remember feeling like things weren't right in that campaign; a lot of the young staffers felt that way -- it wasn't a secret that there were problems in how the campaign was run. The campaign pollster for example, rolled out so many slogans it was impossible to keep track. Here's a sample:

Let the Conversation Begin
Ready for Change, Ready to Lead
Working for Change, Working for You
Strength + Experience = Change. Which leads to the lesser known corollary: ( Strength + Experience ) / Change = 1.

And then, my favorite: Big Challenges, Real Solutions: Time to Pick a President.Which he had printed on the side of a bus but it was basically too small to read.
So, I'm putting these slogans into speeches and I look over at an Obama campaign rally on cable news and they have one slogan. It's just the word "CHANGE" in big letters. That seemed better. But I was timid; and a lot of us just assumed, or wanted to assume, that more experienced people must know what they're doing. But that wasn't true. So the campaign ended, my candidate lost, and I ended up as a presidential speechwriter anyway, which was cool. But the lesson I drew from that campaign, other than the fact that it's always a mistake to run against Barack Obama, is the subway rule: "If you see something, say something." And I've tried to honor that ever since; to call BS when I see it -- and to not be afraid to get in people's faces, and throw a punch or two, to make a point. Metaphorically. Look at me. I wouldn't do well in an altercation.

Now, lessons one and two can be in tension. And I can't tell you how to strike the balance every time. Though it helps to be very charming. And from my point of view, I'd rather be wrong and cringe than right and regret not speaking up. But the good news is, as long as you aren't stubbornly wrong so frequently that they kick you out of the building, or so meek that everyone forgets you're in the building you'll learn and grow and get better at striking that balance, until your inexperience becomes experience. So it's a dilemma that solves itself. How awesome is that?

Finally, number three: Know that being honest -- both about what you do know, and what you don't -- can and will pay off.
Up until recently, I would have said that the only proper response to our culture of BS is cynicism; that it would just get worse and worse. But I don't believe that any more, and I think this matters for what comes next for you. I think we may have reached a critical turning point.

I'm going to say that word one last time. I believe we may have reached "peak bullshit." And that increasingly, those who push back against the noise and nonsense; those who refuse to accept the untruths of politics and commerce and entertainment and government will be rewarded. That we are at the beginning of something important.
We see it across our culture, with not only popularity but hunger for the intellectual honesty of Jon Stewart or the raw sincerity of performers like Louis CK and Lena Dunham. You can even add the rise of dark, brooding, "authentic" super heroes in our blockbuster movies. We see it in locally-sourced, organic food on campuses like this, at places like the Shakedown, a rejection of the processed as inauthentic. We see it in politics.

I believe Barack Obama represents this movement, that the rise of his candidacy was in part a consequence of the desire for greater authenticity in our public life. But you don't have to be a Democrat to believe me. You see it across the political spectrum, from Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts to Chris Christie in New Jersey to Rand Paul in Kentucky.

And what's awesome is that you -- the graduates of schools like Pitzer -- will be the ones who are best prepared and most likely to lead this movement. What's striking about the culture of this school is an unabashedly sincere desire to do good in this world; to be responsible for one another and to carry yourselves with integrity. And it's exciting that, maybe -- just maybe -- those traits won't just mean you do good; that this earnestness, this authenticity, will help you succeed in a society that is demanding those qualities with both hands.
All you have to do is avoid BSing yourself -- in whatever you choose to do. To avoid the path of the sad gay judge filled with regret. To go forward with confidence and an eagerness to learn. And to be honest with yourselves, and others -- to reject a culture of insincerity by virtue of the example you set in your own lives. And I say this only as someone hoping to do the same, along with you for the ride.

Pitzer Class of 2013, you don't need any more encouragement from me. Congratulations. And I can't wait to see what you do next.