Finding a job you love

“Find a job you love and you will never work a day in your life.” – Confucius

If you want a job you love, at a remuneration you feel you deserve, you can take one of the many possible routes. The old fashioned ones are floating your resume amongst placement consultants, looking up newspaper career supplements, going to job sites or just asking around. All of these may work up to a point but they come with limitations.

The jobs on offer may not be what you like. Or not have the flexibility to make you happy about the prospects. More importantly, they may never come up on any of these forums. Your ideal position might be floating somewhere and you would be wandering elsewhere, and paths may never cross. Worse, the job may not yet have been formally defined by an organization but would be created if they were to meet someone like you. Again, what if you never meet?

This is where it helps to moonlight on social media. This includes not only professional networking sites like LinkedIn but social ones like Facebook too. Here are some sound reasons why these work:

Casual talk leads to things: When you network on these sites, it is akin to meeting someone offline at events or one-to-one and having casual conversations. You never know how one thing might lead to another, just like in the real world.

Explore one another: When you meet someone with the agenda of recruitment on the table, a certain level of stiffness and formality comes into play. However, social media allows one to know more about the other without alerting each other. Going through each other’s profiles and contacts, and even connecting with the latter to know more, takes care of a lot of groundwork initially and saves any awkward moments later.

Run background checks: Profiles and contacts also allow both sides to run a background check on one another and arrive at some conclusions, if not all, before further discussions.

Even Facebook speaks a lot: Your Facebook profile may be mostly about your personal life, but they are still a reflection on the kind of person you are. Just because you meet someone at a poolside party for the first time does not stop you from having some professional conversations and forming opinions about the other person. So it is for Facebook.

Discover a love for a job you did not know existed: More often than not, we know we are unhappy in what we are doing but do not know what will make us happy. This is where social media can help again. You may discover things people are doing or offering to others to do, and it may just strike a chord somewhere within you. Only when you hear of these could you realize that this is what you would love and have the capability to do so, or be able to learn how to go about it.

Your CV is not condensed: You can create an extensive CV effectively in the form of your profile, and interested users can filter the same for the desired information. In a normal CV, you tend not to make it too long, deleting certain positions you feel are not very relevant; you don’t need to bother about this on social media. It is like a dynamic CV provided you constantly update it.

Finding overseas opportunities

“I primarily use LinkedIn for looking passively for my next job opportunity in the US. I am currently based in India and looking to migrate to the US. So I try to get in touch with recruiters who are currently working within my target companies, and who are open to networking. There are a lot of recruiters out there who are open to finding quality candidates through LinkedIn and are extremely responsive.

LinkedIn provides a single interface to put up my profile as well as REAL recommendations from my current and past colleagues, which gives recruiters some comfort.

Within a period of about three months after creating my LinkedIn account, I had already received six job leads and landed four telephonic interviews with my target companies! This would not have been possible through any of my other channels, including employee referrals in the target organizations!”

- Rohit Chugh, India (Name changed)

THE HOW OF FINDING THE JOB YOU LOVE

There are many ways to find your dream job through these sites, and you may need to pursue more than one of these to get where you want to.

Get discovered

Just like Dan Nye, CEO of LinkedIn, was by the site’s founder Reid Hoffman. You never know who may be looking for someone like you, and stumbles upon you – through a search or by chance. Make sure to improve your chances of getting a call by not only having a complete, up-to-date profile but also by making it interesting enough for others to get drawn towards you.

Get discovered through participation

Of course, the chances of your getting discovered would be low if you stay inside a hole on these sites. Make yourself visible whenever you can. You can do so by:

Being active on LinkedIn Q&A
Join relevant groups
Attend any offline events
Stay in touch with your contacts through regular correspondence.

You never know when a conversations could lead to opportunities. Just like the case of a hardware engineer who shared this: “I met someone through the LinkedIn Answers section who asked a question regarding a technical topic of interest to me in hardware design. We started conversing via email, and it turned out he was the director of US operations for a European company designing EDA tools in the very area which I am interested in working. I quasi-interviewed via email (including with one of the founders), and now I am awaiting a formal job offer.”

Get referred

If you are open to a change of jobs, it may be a good idea to inform some of your trusted contacts. They could help by referring you to someone who might be able to help, or refer your name, should they know of anyone looking for someone like you.

Go and find the employer and job you want

If you have a company, or a few, in mind where you may like to work, but are not sure if they have an opening, it may be a smart idea to look up any LinkedIn or Facebook users working at these companies. Try and get a conversation going. If you have their attention, there are many ways they can help you:

On your lucky day, they will tell you about your dream position being available, and guide you to the person to pitch to.
On most days, they will only be able to direct you to someone who may know. Request them to drop a line of introduction if they can before you contact this person.
In larger organizations, it may be more useful to find people within the department you are seeking an opening in. If you find such people, you could ask them directly about any vacancies; if you win their confidence, they may even be able to tell you who is about to quit. Move fast if this may be the case.

Actually, it is not only current employees of the target company who may be able to help, but former ones too. They may still be clued in to the who’s who in the company, or know how the system works. In fact, you could get quite candid and objective inputs from them. Current employees may not be at a liberty to talk as freely.

ALL THIS COMES WITH SOME HARD WORK

All this may sound easy in theory, but actually involves a fair deal of work - even if you have the best written profile going around. Unless you are having an unusually good day.

Otherwise, you may need to put in some hard work. Not necessarily in terms of hours, but in terms of being smart about it. Even two hours a week can go a long way if used right.

Your network matters: The bigger your network of relevant contacts, the more people you can potentially tap when hunting for a job. And if some of these are heavyweight names, your stock can go up in the eyes of the recruiter and the hiring company. Recruiters may also want to run independent reference checks, so invite those contacts to be a part of your network who can speak about you if called upon to. According to LinkedIn, adding five connections makes you 3.7 times more likely to receive a job offer.

Be an active participant: The more you are seen around these sites, the better your chances. This could be on the ‘Answers’ section, in various groups, on member mailing groups, offline events and more. Mingle around when you can.

Recommend and seek recommendations: Recruiters also make sure they check out recommendations when viewing your profile. Try and get a few from your contacts. Invite them to do so if need be - it is an acceptable practice. And reciprocate when asked to do so yourself. But ensure the recommendations you receive and give are honest, and not friends giving undeserved flattery. It should also not come from someone who barely knows your work – a sensible person will always see through it. And if you have any A-plus talent saying it is willing to work with you and recommend you, that’s much of the battle won.