Social Media Tools For Your Job Search

Searching for your next career opportunity can be a frustrating and tiresome process. Thankfully, there are an unprecedented number of free tools and resources to alleviate some of the stress and ease the time commitment of trying to secure a new job.

The key is identifying the tools that suit your needs and maximizing their usefulness to assist you with your search. Problem is that choosing from an enormous list of applications, plugins, extensions, and websites with unfamiliar names can seem like a daunting task.

To make things easier, here are six tools that you might find helpful while on the job hunt.

1. Rapportive – Display the social media profiles of your contacts within Gmail.

Rapportive is a browser plugin that enables you to view the various social media profiles of a contact and see whether you are connected without leaving Gmail.

We’ve all experienced the tedious process of navigating back and forth between tabs to search a number of social networks for a single contact. This can be especially time-consuming when you’re actively networking and trying to connect with colleagues, friends, and prospective employers across a variety of platforms.

Rapportive does much of the work for you by searching for any profiles associated with a given email address and displaying them all in one place. You can even see profile pictures, submit a LinkedIn request, or read the person’s tweets all without leaving your email window. Rapportive even announced enhanced features earlier this month, as demonstrated in its video below.

Tip: Use Rapportive to help you confirm the email address of a contact you’re trying to reach. See the video below to learn how.

2. PostPost – Find historical content from the people you follow.

PostPost is a Web application that allows you to conduct Twitter searches limited only to the people you follow (or further narrowed if you so choose). No matter how closely a person follows his or her Twitter stream, important tweets inevitably get lost in the overwhelming tidal wave of content crashing their way.

PostPost enables you to find relevant content on demand by delivering results on a given search topic from accounts you’ve selected, rather than requiring you to sift through unwanted tweets as Twitter does.

If you’re looking to brush up on what the people you follow have to say on a certain subject prior to an interview, PostPost can simplify the process for you.

Pro Tip for Rapportive users from Dave Cutler on Vimeo.

Tip: If you’re trying to demonstrate how often you’ve tweeted about a particular topic, conduct a PostPost search and limit the results to your own tweets. Save the search and send a link to whomever you choose. This saves people the trouble of weeding through all of your tweets and even gives those who aren’t Twitter savvy an easy format in which to see what you’ve had to say.

3. WiseStamp – Promote your social media profiles and Web activity in your email signature

WiseStamp is a browser extension (currently available for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) that enables you to turn your email signature into a promotional tool with enhanced functionality.

It’s a safe assumption that prospective employers are going to examine your social media activity. You can simplify the process for them by making your profiles readily available in the signature of your email.

This also gives you the opportunity to highlight the accounts that you think are most effective at showing off your social media self. WiseStamp signatures can also be used to feature your most recent blog post and tweet. The recipient can follow you, reply to you, or retweet you, all within the body of the email.

Our second screencast! from PostPost on Vimeo.

Tip: If you activate the “latest tweet” feature in your signature, try to ensure (whenever possible) that it’s relevant to the person or company you’re contacting regarding potential employment. Conversely, double check to make sure the tweet isn’t something you want to delete. In general, it’s probably best to remove @ replies unless it’s something you specifically want the recipient of the email to see.

View more useful tools here.

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About the Author

Ronn Richardson

Ronn Richardson is a young PR professional from NYC who is determined to learn as much as he can despite any barriers that try to hinder him. Eager to see a change in the types of online publications that college students, young professionals and new-school entrepreneurs visit, he conceived Socialtik Mag.