Tag Archives: twitter

Tweets, not résumés, to get a job?

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This is an interesting article in usatoday this weekend. Apparently this company is looking for employees with ‘online personalities’ regardless of what they can do. While I think the article is a bit extreme I do see this becoming a trend. Whether we like it or not, an abundance of followers on social media platforms equals credibility. If you’re planning on boosting your social engagement on a platform like Instagram, you can easily buy Instagram followers here. However I just was having a discussion this weekend with a colleague and we were discussing how ‘recommendations’ within social media sites like linkedin were not very valuable as people who did not know either of us had recommended us and added skills to our profile in hopes that we would do the same to theirs. Here is a quote from the article:

“The paper résumé is dead,” says Vala Afshar, chief marketing officer at the tech firm Enterasys Networks that is in the process of hiring a six-figure, senior social media strategist based on tweets. Afshar refuses to even look at résumés. “The Web is your résumé. Social networks are your mass references.”

Beginning Monday, job prospects can begin tweeting for the job, which he hopes to fill by April. “I believe the very best talent isn’t even looking for work,” Afshar says. “They’re mobile and socially connected and too busy changing the world.”

Think of it as a 140-character job interview. Even the folks at Twitter are a bit surprised. “I don’t think we’ve heard of that before actually,” says spokeswoman Alexandra Valasek in an e-mail.”

“It didn’t matter to me what they’re like in an interview setting,” Biebert says. “All that mattered was their online personality.”

What do you think?

What do hashtags # and other symbols on twitter and facebook mean?

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What is twitterspeak? Well it’s how we communicate on twitter and other social media sites of course:)

The hashtag (#) is simply a way to search. This was designed for twitter and is used as a way to search. So if I were discussing mobile learning in a post I could say #mobilelearning and then anyone searching twitter for mobile learning posts could more easily find mine. Now people are using this on facebook, however, facebook does not currently use these to search but that could be changed in the future.

Another symbol used on twitter is the @ symbol. This is used to refer to someone. So if someone were speaking about me, their post might include @raypastore which would then link to my profile. Again this is being used on facebook but does not actually link to the referenced person.

I hope this helps clear up two of the most common ‘symbols’ used on facebook and twitter and help people understand what they mean and how they are used.