Category Archives: Job Search

Announced first by TechCrunch just moments ago, professional social network, LinkedIn, has just announced its acquisition of presentation/document-sharing powerhouse SlideShare for $119 million. This deal is something that will certainly benefit the professional community on LinkedIn–161 million members strong–in their attempt to build their social graph on the site. Sure, you could already add the SlideShare application to your profile, but now with SlideShare part of the LinkedIn family, members could theoretically go ahead and not only add their presentations to their profile, thereby making it more portfolio-like, but also implementing it on company pages, groups, etc.

In their press release, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said the following:

Presentations are one of the main ways in which professionals capture and share their experiences and knowledge, which in turn helps shape their professional identity. These presentations also enable professionals to discover new connections and gain the insights they need to become more productive and successful in their careers, aligning perfectly with LinkedIn’s mission and helping us deliver even more value for our members. We’re very excited to welcome the SlideShare team to LinkedIn.

We know that the economy here in the United States is pretty bad–there are more than 12 million Americans currently without a job and make up the alarming 8.2% unemployment rate (as of March 2012). There’s a strong desire by the public to have our politicians put us back to work, but regardless of the effort, most people agree that we must do more in order to help those who have been out of work for some time. But the public sector isn’t the only part of our economy that should be responsible for helping to create jobs–the private sector is doing their fair share with one in particular standing out and trying to achieve something great. That company would be SmartRecruiters.

Known as a free social recruiting platform, SmartRecruiters is a San Francisco-based startup that has undertaken a great endeavor. They’re calling it the Zero Unemployment Movement, and this campaign is designed to make a fantasy into a reality–imagine a world where there’s zero unemployment and that people that wish to work, can work and where businesses need people, they can easily find people. So they’re taking the first steps in helping to make this paradigm happen and it’s going to be a massive undertaking. Last week, SmartRecruiters launched the “Got Jobs?” campaign whose goal is to create one million jobs right here in the United States. With over 3.5 million jobs unfilled, if companies only found people to take those spots, the economy might be a little better off.

I started looking for a job in Silicon Valley in May 2011. In April 2012, I’m finally starting the kind of job for which I moved across the country.

The job search is exhausting and defeating. I can think of no bigger blow to my ego and self-confidence than the last 6 months of what I’ve called the Great Western Job Search. It’s not just the countless interviews, where you basically sell yourself. It’s the hundreds of resumes that get sent out, culled by systems like Taleo, and only pop if you have the right keyword. It’s this feeling that you’ve sent an endless number of resumes into the universe and you never even know if they reached the intended recipient.

I hear so much about the Social Media Job Search and I’ve come to believe that most job seekers are doing it wrong. Yes, you can use all the tools out there to find a job. But I now fully believe in the old adage: it’s who you know. Believe me, I’d heard that for years and never really believed it.

Instead of spending all day on Monster and CareerBuilder and Dice, cut that time in half. Spend the rest of your time cultivating your network using social media. Individually, let your LinkedIn contacts know you’re looking. Reach out to your Facebook friends, in small groups or individually, and let them know you’re on the marke. Make those relationships work for you. It’s your weaker ties, those friends of friends, who could very well have the job opening you want. Use the LinkedIn job search function that displays how your existing network plays into the hiring company. If you have a 2nd or 3rd removed connection to that company, those are your weak ties. Reach out and cultivate those. Get your contacts to work for you.

About a month ago, I talked about my experiences with the hiring process at Company A. I still maintain that in the job search process, you have a responsibility to yourself to trust your own instincts. However, there also comes a time when you just need to pay the rent, instincts be damned. That’s how I ended up at Company B.

The same week I was offered the Company A job, I was also offered a position at Company B. Company B represented everything I could have done back in Cincinnati. It wasn’t a change; it wasn’t technology; it wasn’t in a great location; it didn’t have the focus I wanted. It did offer slightly more than my minimum salary requirement and it would suffice in the short-run. It even had a decent job title, so taking the job wouldn’t be setting me back in any way. But in no way was this the dream job I’d moved across the country to find.

Remember all those red flags I should have paid attention to with Company A? Even Company B raised some red flags. Unfortunately, I had to pay the rent. Company B interviewed me six times, including phone interviews, between early September and my start date in December. I was told different things by different people throughout the interviews. In particular, I kept probing into how were they using learning technology. The question was answered differently each time. I think it depended on how much the interviewer wanted to sell me on the position as to how they answered. In the end, I crossed my fingers.

With the explosion of social media opportunities in the world, people are often wondering just what is the going rate for people in these positions. Often these things plague both the employer and the employee. Take, for example, the Community Manager role–some might say that it’s a marketing position, or something that would be more public relations focused, so they use the closest salary range that they associate with that department. The problem is that social media isn’t strictly a marketing, public relations, sales, customer service, or communication role–it’s bits and pieces of everything.

So when people are going into interviews for social media strategist, community manager, or social media marketing positions, it can be really difficult to answer to the question “what is your expected salary?” because there’s not a lot of research out there to help potential candidates ascertain that estimated amount without trying to lump it into a range of a position that it closely resembles.

Well, until now, that is…

Onward Search, a talent staffing agency devoted to helping connect the best Internet marketing, design, and mobile application development professionals around the country, recently released a very helpful infographic called Social Media Jobs Salary Guide and it’s a look around the top 20 U.S. markets. Salaries are broken down by locations like New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, DC, Seattle, Austin, Denver, Houston, Phoenix, and several other social media hubs in the country. This infographic examines the salary ranges for six popular and available social media roles within companies: Blogger/social media copywriter, social media specialist, online community manager, public relations/brand manager, social media strategist, and social media marketing manager. Unfortunately, it doesn’t distinguish the roles in specifics and you’ll have to make some guesses in terms of which role you best fit in and there aren’t real descriptions. The salary ranges represent the 25% and 75% percentile for each job title in each city provided from Indeed.com.

Click the image below to view the entire Social Media Jobs Salary Guide provided by Onward Search:

Photo Credit: Salary by Jabberwockey381/Flickr