Although really targeting traditional job seekers, I felt attending could help me tune my marketing efforts for Devizes Solutions and be a good networking opportunity and I am happy to report that it was great on both counts. I had visited the excellent New Horizons facility before, as they regularly host TechBirmingham events and they did provide some fantastic information for the new job seeker on the job search process and how to finance your training with grant and loan programs. For me though, the most interesting presentation was by Heath Wade who runs both Technical Staffing Solutions and Strategic Career Focus. Heath spoke on social networking and what I really caught my attention was when Heath mentioned that recruiters were starting to move away from the traditional internet job boards as the medium for posting opportunities, identifying and prescreening potential candidates and instead, using LinkedIn.

I maintain my resume on a number of job boards, particularly monster, careerbuilder, Dice and computerjobs.com and I always felt it is a great way to generate new business because it enables others, looking for particular expertise, to find you. I would still recommend small business owners maintain a profile on these boards even though numerous people have told me that only a small percentage of traditional hiring is generated via such sites. I will say this however, recruiters using these sites are becoming more and more specific about the particular skillset they are looking for and in order to identify candidates with that skillset they are using automated search tools to process huge numbers of resumes for certain key words. To get any value from job boards the candidate has to ensure that all unique skills and applications with which they have experience, appear in their posted resume and let me share an anecdote to explain why.

I have a long and illustrious career. I have worked with many clients and on many, many different projects. As such, my resume is correspondingly long and as a personal aide-mémoire, I include the project or system name on my resume to spark my quickly failing memory, should someone ask questions about my experience from the dim and distant past. Recently an ex-client of mine opened a requisition and included as a mandatory requirement, experience on one of their internal systems. I had worked on the project to create the system initially and the system name appeared as a footnote in my resume. It was unusual, I can’t imagine more than a handful of people have that on their resume and within 48 hours of the requisition being posted I had received emails and phone calls from nearly fifty vendors trying to fill the position. So optimize your resume for automatic processing and key words are well, key.

Anyway, to return to Heath’s presentation, the recommendations are clear, both for the traditional job seeker and the small business owner; business is generated through networking and the new best place for this on the web is LinkedIn. Make sure your unique product, skills, value proposition or resume are part of your profile, make connections to people you know and to the people you meet and update your ‘what are you doing now’ regularly. You don’t have to do it as often as teenagers’ update their Facebook status, but if you do it weekly your name will appear on the weekly network updates email received by most everyone you are connected to. That keeps you in the forefront of their minds and that is another string to your marketing bow for free.

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