As a young professional entering the market with some or no professional work experience, we have a leverage against all previous generations that didn’t exist before. Most college graduates ask, how do I get a good job right out of college without previous work experience? While others hope their internships will stack up and really represent their skills and knowledge. Whether you’re on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or LinkedIn you already have an online presence. What most of us don’t realize is that we have the chance now to utilize the tools of social media platforms to showcase our skills and our abilities to stand out to employers regardless of whether you have work experience or not. Here’s how:
BECOME A STORYTELLER
We all have been guilty of posting a photo of our latte or our lunch or dinner on Instagram and Facebook. We have also been guilty of posting selfies with witty and playful captions. Instead, the way to showcase your skills and your abilities especially those that want to show their creativity and their excellent communication skills would be to, one, take a great photo (whether its a selfie or a photo of food or something or someplace you love) and then, two, think of the caption space of the post as a place to tell a story and write a well thought out narrative about who you are and what that photo means. It doesn’t have to be long, but it needs to be a story. Talk about what you learned, who you’ve met, what you’ve been working on, what you’ve been thinking about and truly convey who you are in every word you say. Why do this? The post itself will be relatable and tell your story and become a piece to a bigger story on your profile which showcases more than one aspect of who you are.
The example below shows an Instagram post with a short story.
START WRITING MORE
Young writers still in college have so much talent! It startles me how many of us young writers don’t look into the outlets we have available where an audience is waiting to hear from us. Two awesome outlets available to us are LinkedIn and Medium by Twitter. These two sites allow us to publish articles that will be seen by your LinkedIn connections and their connections as well as by the entire Medium community which is packed full of potential employers and people that work at your dream job right now! Write a good article on a topic you love and are very knowledgeable about and put that content out on LinkedIn and Medium. You’ll place yourself as a stellar candidate in the field you want to be in. Plus, when you’re heading to those job interviews, the articles you write and the results (likes and shares you receive) will be great pieces to show in your portfolio.
CREATE CONSISTENCY
Because you’re on social media platforms already, your potential employer will most definitely do a search for your online presence to get a sense of how you showcase yourself online. One great way to help yourself stand out for those online presence checks is by being consistent on your Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and LinkedIn profiles. That doesn’t mean you have to post the same content on everywhere you are active online. It means you should come across as the same person on all platforms. That requires some authenticity on your part to understand the message you want to convey to anyone that finds you online.
Being authentic will help guide you into a consistent brand on every social media platform. A few ways to do this are posting about similar topics you’re interested in or things and places you like, sharing similar stories on all your platforms while changing the stories a little bit to adapt to the platform you’re on, and creating a encapsulating theme of colors or interests that is present in everything you do online.