How To Establish A Strong Professional Online Presence As A Jobseeker
Publié le 15 February 2024
Build your employee brand by knowing how to establish a strong professional online presence as a jobseeker.
It’s a competitive job market out there. How can you differentiate yourself from the competition and give yourself the best possible head start in the job race?
One way is to build yourself a professional online presence.
It’s rare these days for employers not to look a potential employee up on the internet as part of the hiring process. What they find there can potentially make or break their hiring decision. In fact, 21% of recruiters openly admit to rejecting someone based on their Facebook profile!
So, you need to make sure they find something impressive.
Here’s everything you need to know about a professional online presence, from what it is and why it’s important to how you can create one for yourself.
What is a professional online presence?
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When an employer searches your name on Google or on social media sites, the results they get will lead them to your ‘online presence’: your social profiles, your blog/website (if you have one), news items you appear in, and any other instances of your name cropping up online. The accumulation of your searchable digital activity is known as your ‘online presence’.
How deep a potential employer digs into your digital footprint depends a lot on the job you’re going for and what the employer finds. For example, if you’re aiming for a job in national security, your potential employer won’t leave a single cyber-stone unturned – they need to know absolutely everything about you.
On the other hand, if you’re seeking a job in contact center services, it’s unlikely that your potential new boss will do more than check the highlights (your socials, website etc). That being said, if they find some red flags or something that interests them they may well dig deeper to get more context, so it’s always worth keeping your online presence as polished as possible.
If you can keep your digital activity clean and professional, show that you’re likely to follow relevant social media guidelines, promote your achievements, and generally curate an online image that showcases your talents (and hides anything that might make you less employable – like photos of yourself doing keg stands during your college days, for example!), your chances of being hired get a huge boost.
Why is a professional online presence important?
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Nobody is ‘on’ all the time. We like to relax, have fun, and speak our minds sometimes. Often this kind of activity makes its way online. Social media is an important tool for connection and socializing in the modern world. Keeping it completely professional at all times is no fun. So why should you?
Well, nobody is saying that you should become a complete corporate drone online. We’ll go into how you can keep your personal and professional online lives separate in a bit. But there are a lot of benefits to having a professional online presence. Here’s why you should make the effort to curate a polished, professional digital brand:
Employers will look at your digital footprint, including your socials
A good resumé is a great start. It will pique an employer’s interest. But modern employers know that they can often find the most honest impression of a potential employee by searching for them online. And we don’t just mean your LinkedIn profile (although that is often the first place they’ll look).
First, they’ll probably do a quick Google search to see if there are any hits for your name. It’s likely they’ll take great interest in your website or blog if you have one. If you have a YouTube or TikTok channel they’ll find it and browse your content. Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat – a determined employer will find them all and comb through them to get a feel for what you’re like and whether you’d be a good fit for the company.
So, it’s a good idea to hide anything that makes you seem less employable, and put anything that boosts your employability front and center.
Digital footprint checks aren’t just relevant for jobseekers, either. Increasingly, monitoring employee socials is an important factor in WFM (WorkForce Management), as companies are aware that problematic online behavior from their employees reflects badly on them. Even current employees can be disciplined and fired for poor online behavior, so it’s highly unlikely that any employer will hire someone with a problematic digital presence.
Ensuring that your identity check online is clean and professional is crucial in today’s job market.
It allows you to present yourself as the perfect employee
Instead of seeing employers searching your online presence as a problem, view it instead as an opportunity. Creating a professional online presence allows you to present yourself as employable in ways that go beyond what you can achieve with a typical CV.
To return to the contact center analogy for a moment, you can use your digital platforms to do things like post yourself getting on well with your teammates, to demonstrate that you are competent with call center systems technology, and to show that you have the kind of friendly and patient demeanor needed to deal with difficult customers.
All in all, you can show potential employers that you are the perfect person for the job in a much more immediate and impactful way than is possible with a simple resumé.
It helps you to establish a personal brand
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A personal brand is a very useful thing to have as a jobseeker. A personal brand helps you to differentiate yourself from the competition, to showcase your personal values and motivations, and to make yourself visible in all the right ways.
Building a personal brand can be a long process, involving a lot of networking and building up a reputation within your industry over years. Luckily, you can speed things up a lot with a professional online presence.
By curating your personal brand online you can showcase that you are a motivated and professional individual who always exceeds performance goals. This ensures potential searchers find information that corresponds well with their own brand values.
Plus, if you’ve managed to get attention from your peers, or have a decently sized following, your potential as an asset increases – did you know that brand messaging shared from personal accounts reaches over 500% further? Having a strong online presence directly leads to value for prospective employers.
4 tips for creating a positive professional online presence
So, it’s well worth creating a positive professional online presence. But how can you do it?
Here are four tips:
- Create your own website and/or blog
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A personal website and/or blog gives you an unparalleled opportunity to demonstrate your values, motivations, skills, and personality in a way that’s completely your own. You can build and curate your personal brand perfectly with the right website, right down to things like colour scheme and graphics.
A blog in particular is great for showing that you really know your stuff and can express it in an engaging and informative way. A good blog can even position you as a thought leader within your industry, and help you make a name for yourself that could lead to greater job opportunities in the future.
If you have taken any relevant business courses, consider highlighting your knowledge and expertise by incorporating these insights into your blog or website content. This can further establish your credibility and demonstrate your commitment to professional development.
So, if you can, build a resume website alongside your personal blog or website, and direct potential employers to it.
- Build professional social media profiles
LinkedIn is the go-to social media platform for professionals, with 6 people hired every minute through it, so make your LinkedIn profile as polished and professional as possible. But you shouldn’t limit your efforts to LinkedIn alone.
Creating professional social media profiles on all relevant sites has an extra benefit: it helps you to present yourself in the right way online, and it can direct potential employers away from your more personal profiles. If the first thing that comes up when they search Facebook for your name is a well-curated and impressively professional profile, they’re unlikely to keep hunting for your other profiles (if you have any).
So, build yourself professional profiles on all relevant social media sites, and update them with anything that is relevant to your work and is likely to impress potential employers.
- Polish (or lock down!) your personal socials
There’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a more relaxed online presence to express yourself and communicate with friends and family. But remember that if you’re publicly posting things that employers may find unprofessional (or even potentially damaging to their brand) on those profiles, your job prospects could suffer.
So, go through your personal socials and adjust your privacy settings where necessary to make sure that only the right people can see your posts. Polish up your social media so that no potential employer can find any red flags, no matter how wild you were in your college days! You can even use nicknames on your personal accounts and your full name on professional ones to guarantee employers only see what you want them to see.
These days, you can usually lock down profiles completely to strangers, leaving only your profile picture and basic info visible. This is often a good idea not just for employability’s sake, but also for general digital safety. Just make sure that your profile picture makes you seem suitably trustworthy and employable.
- Network online as much as possible
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Networking has always been important for business, but online networking is more vital than ever in this age of outsourcing. As employers look for good remote employees to take on outsourced tasks, recommendations via a strong online network can be a crucial factor in landing jobs.
Online networking is a fantastic way to get your name out there and build a reputation for yourself. The bigger your network is, the more name recognition you will have and the better your chances of being recommended to employers. So, build your professional online presence and boost your chances of employment by networking as much as you can
What do we mean by ‘online networking’? Well, it varies from person to person and industry to industry, but generally it involves things like:
- Engaging with relevant posts
- Joining industry groups
- Being active in industry chats
- Sharing and featuring content from others
- Connecting with other professionals online
Use a professional online presence to secure the perfect job
The internet and social media has crept into every aspect of modern life, and job seeking is no different. The days when you could paint a rosy picture of yourself with a resumé, safe in the knowledge that potential employers would never see the embarrassing pics from your teens, are over. Modern employers know how to find you online, and they will.
But this doesn’t have to be a threat. In fact, it gives you a fantastic opportunity to showcase yourself to your best. By locking down your more personal online activity and building a professional online presence, you can greatly increase your chances of getting job offers.
So, think hard about what you’re putting online, who
