My Name is John and Im confused by Social Media

Finding a job in medical or healthcare fields is more difficult now than ever.

There was a time, not so long ago that when you decided to look for a new job you picked up the paper on a Thursday or a Sunday.  If you really wanted to make sure you didn’t miss any jobs you also contacted a Recruitment agency or maybe two.

Then it changed a bit.  The online explosion of the web led to the creation of job boards.  In Ireland the biggest of these were IrishJobs, RecruitIreland, Monster and Loadzajobs.  All of a sudden it was no longer even necessary to buy a paper, you could surf jobs from your couch at home (or often from a computer at work).

Job sites made finding a job easier.  Job boards charged companies and Recruitment agencies a lot of money for the privilege of using their services to advertise their positions.

For a while it worked well.  But now finding a job is more complicated than ever.  There has been an absolute explosion of job boards.  Which one should you use?  To add to the complication recruitment agencies and even companies themselves are increasingly turning to social media for their recruitment.  So much so that CPL have just dropped IrishJobs. Simply because they no longer provided them with the value for money that was available elsewhere.

Social Media, Web 2.0, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Blogs.  New buzzwords are appearing all the time.  Recruitment agencies are reaching out over increasingly diverse online media.  Twitter alone is awash with job advertisements.  The popularity of Twitter is beyond the understanding of most of us born in an era when most companies did the books on paper and nobody had a PC at home.  So why would recruitment agencies use it?  Because it is popular and it is free.  Marketing and job advertising on social media cost little more than the time and effort to do it… and even that can be automated. Clearly it works for job advertising and job hunting.  It is all about connections.

Where does that leave the bamboozled majority?  I’ll explain it.  Social networking is about just that.  Networking (the social part has been hijacked by recruitment agencies and business in general).  The old saying holds true, “It’s not what you know it’s who you know”.  In the world of Linkedin and Facebook that translates to “It’s not what you know it’s who you linked to, and who they in turn are liked to”.

If you build a good network, you can find just about anything you want, including a job.

It is worth getting involved.  The more links you build the more people you are connected to.  When it truly was “Social” media, it was about linking to your friends over the internet.  Now it is much more than that.

A word of warning though.  Be careful what you post, and what your friends post.  If you are linking to anybody who you may be a potential employer, or at least help you find a job, then you do not want them to see from your profile that your CV is a work of fiction, or that you had the worst hangover in the world (again) and had to call in sick after yet another great night out with your mates.  Set up separate accounts for job finding if you can’t trust your friends not to write something incriminating on your wall.

So do you have to get involved in social networking now?  Not at all.  Recruitment agencies still perform the same function that they always did, the papers have less jobs advertised now though, so perhaps they are a better option than ever.  When it comes to medical jobs, chose a good agency.  Chose several.  Remember, finding a job does still involve people (even when it’s over the internet).  The internet is just a big newspaper.

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