Reporter
Harnessing the power of social media in a job search could make finding the best fitting career incredibly simple.
Baylor’s Center for Career and Professional Development hosted Ryanne Janca, a talent acquisition specialist with Enterprise Holdings, during one of its professional development sessions for students Thursday.
Enterprise Holdings is the parent company of Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Alamo Rent-A-Car and National Car Rental.
Janca gave students an in-depth look into how they can best utilize social media channels, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn in their search for jobs.
“As a corporation, over the last five years, we have really focused on that social media presence,” Janca said.
According to Janca, companies today are using all the same major social networking sites that people use for personal purposes, to build up their social media presence.
Facebook is a great place to begin searching for companies that might have interesting jobs available.
“Follow companies that interest you,” Janca said.
Many companies have several facebook pages, tailored to the specific areas of their business, including job opportunities and recruiting.
“Start looking on Facebook, and if you don’t find that corporation, sometimes look under that corporation’s name and then careers,” Janca said.
Many companies use the major social network sites for different purposes.
“A lot of companies really look at Twitter as, ‘Okay, we just want to blast out information as much as possible’,” Janca said.
Whereas companies will use Facebook more to broadcast what the company is currently involved with, and they will use sites like LinkedIn and YouTube to broadcast posts and videos about job opportunities.
Janca said many companies prefer posting job opportunities on Twitter because it is free, as opposed to posting them on LinkedIn where they are charged a fee per post.
Knowing how to utilize all of the different interactive aspects of the different social networks can be very beneficial in searching for a job.
“Hashtags are going to allow you to really follow an idea,” Janca said.
According to Janca, following hashtags on Twitter that are relevant to specific jobs, including #jobsearch, #career and #employment, can help locate companies that are looking for people to fill positions.
Janca graduated from Texas Tech University, in 2002, with a bachelors of business administration and marketing.
She began working for Enterprise Holdings in June 2003, and by July 2006, she had worked her way up the ladder and moved into the Talent Acquisition department.
She also said it is very important to have a serious professional online presence and to use the same profile pictures on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter so that companies can find the people they are looking for more easily.
“Employers do not really have the time to be stalking you,” Janca said.
One student who attended Janca’s presentation learned a lot from her insights on making profile pictures uniform across social media platforms.
“Now I really understand how employers instantaneously recognize you when they are able to look at your profile picture,” Hyderabad, India, first semester MBA student, Janaki Bhupatiraju said.
Janca likened LinkedIn to the popular game ‘six degrees of separation’, as the site is meant to build connections and if there is a job opportunity posted by a friend of a friend, contacting that friend to pursue that opportunity will be very helpful.
A quality in one’s online presence that Janca said was very important is professionalism in corresponding with potential employers.
“Quality trumps quantity; it does not need to be a consistent hounding,” Janca said.
