Technology, in essence, has complete control over every aspect of our lives. With its advancement comes the convenience of the most typical of routines. A prime example is the process of looking for a job. A decade ago, you found people that hungered for work and would go out of their way to expose their strongest traits in hopes of landing a job. Personalities would be a strong fragment and the written portion of an application and, in most cases, provide a resume along with it. The days of submitting resumes and resume submission services are nearing an end as social networks are increasingly becoming more and more popular. With such an easy solution for learning about one’s past experience and qualifications, the idea of a resume is becoming what can be labeled as a “memory of yesterday.”
Social media is capitalizing on communication and tracking the professional development of people as a whole. While at one time each development in a professional field would have to be edited into a resume, saved, and then sent out, in this day and age the addition of a vital piece of information can be done with a click and typing the information that could potentially change a person’s chance of securing a job.
While this adjustment of revision seems minimal, it may just be, but multiply the amount of changes and the amount of people doing it and the amount of time saved as a whole becomes a drastic number. Time is a limited commodity that no one has enough of, and by taking advantage of every minute to its maximum potential you create more time for other important matters.
The social media allows a way for people to interact with one another that are in a same common interest and field without using resume submission services. It becomes a giant network of candidates and gives employees a chance to bounce ideas off one another and learn from one another; and gives employers the chance to have a vast group of personalities and skills to choose from. Every position of work requires certain identifiable traits, and by using something such as social media, you have the opportunity to have them all in front of you to evaluate and compare at the same time. Whereas resume submission services at one time laid out a general idea to you as to who someone was and what their background specialized in, social media goes a step further.
Social media allows you to see the background of a given individual as well as previous education and their hobbies. It also allows you to get a little insight to the individual based on the voice tone they use in their descriptions. You can generally identify the kind of person they are and put together an image to who they really are; as opposed to resumes that only provide a background of job history as well as educational reference. While that can tell you about the person’s success and background to an extent, it doesn’t give you the ability to see who they really are as a person and how they compose themselves.
Social media extends a multitude of paths to follow to really get to the key points of an individual. It also gives you tools to contact the individual and talk a bit further to get a better grasp as to who they are and their real capabilities. As a whole, the social media outlet grants an endless amount of ways to evaluate someone for a job, whereas a resume puts a standard label to “x” individual and it is something that is so limited that it’s facts and nothing more.
The composition of an individual stems beyond facts, and to limit it to only facts, limits the clear evaluation you could have. Job networking relies on several things to pick the right candidate to do a job at their maximum efficiency, in a day and age where you can evaluate to a much closer degree as to what someone is and how someone behaves, why wouldn’t you? It not only guarantees a higher likelihood for an individual’s success but also the success of the company that takes them on board.
Richard McMunn is the founder of How2become, a leading career specialist for public sector careers and JobsInLancashire.com; a online jobs service provider in the UK. Richard has a real passion for helping people prepare for and pass tough recruitment processes and assessment centres in order to secure their dream job.