Recruiter: you need a personal brand online to crack the jobs market

Article by HELEN TRINCA, published in The Australian, MAY 21, 2021

It was about five years ago when recruiter Erin Devlin began to notice that employers were checking out job candidates on the internet – not to find out if they had been involved in scandal or inappropriate Instagram shots, but to score their skills and experience were.

The managing director of people2people Recruitment Victoria tells The Deal the most important factor in getting the job you want is to get your online branding right.

“You need to be proactive about how you appear online, as well as making sure there is nothing there that you don’t want an employer to see,” she says. “Being able to effectively market yourself through online branding if you are looking for a job or a promotion is very important.”

And while Millennials “live and breathe” technology and social media, they are not necessarily better at harnessing it for career purposes, she says. Indeed, Devlin sees people of all ages becoming adept at online branding.

LinkedIn is the most important site but, depending on the sector you work in, it’s important to appear positively on Instagram and Twitter, for example.

“If you are looking for a job in IT, perhaps on a help desk, and you are a university graduate, you could have a YouTube channel solving basic IT issues,” says Devlin, who has just written a book called, Get the Job You Really Want. “If I was an employer and I saw that I would think, wow, you are a standout.”

Devlin says this is the year when people really can get their “dream jobs” because of the strength of the market and the renewed economic growth after COVID-19.

She says there has been a dramatic shift in the jobs market in the past four to six weeks, with a reduction in the numbers of people applying for the same job after a year when employers were overwhelmed by the number of candidates. More people are now finding jobs but the other factor in the lower applications is because so many people are now so busy at work, because colleagues have been laid off, that they simply do not have time to apply for another job to advance their careers, she says.

But the mood is changing: “I saw a lot of people last year where the main focus was to get food on the table. We saw people who were compromising on the type of role, the level and sometimes on the salary. I believe everyone deserves to have a great job and some people are putting their heads up now and saying I want a job I love.

“Most candidates are reporting their workloads have increased significantly, they are not getting the resources they need. People leave if the workload is not manageable. There was candidate hesitancy last year but we are seeing less of that this year.”

Devlin says workers have migrated between industries in the past year, with people moving out of hospitality, for example, because they are wary of further lockdowns and loss of jobs, and into customer service and sales.

There are real shortages in some areas: “It’s incredibly difficult to find a receptionist because they didn’t want to face potential lockdowns.”

Closed international borders have been “hugely disruptive”.

“If you speak to any of the Big 4 accounting firms they are seeing shortages in audit and tax accounting,” Devlin says. “In hospitality, regional employers and metropolitan ones are struggling to get employees. They are so excited to see people coming back through tourism but they can’t get enough staff. It’s not feasible to train people up in such short periods of time.”

Devlin notes recent criticism of employers and recruiters who use AI to filter applications, criticism that technology can amplify biases around race and gender and is often a crude instrument for selecting candidates.

“The technology is improving but we see some concerns regarding AI used for weighting candidates and about how video interviewing assesses facial expressions for example,” she says.

She says it’s important for employers who use AI to have good auditing and checking processes in place to ensure against any inherent biases in the process, but that the technology has been important at a time when there have been hundreds of applications for individual jobs and employers have needed an efficient filtering system.

To overcome technology issues, Devlin advises applicants to make sure their CVs contain key words that will be picked up by AI.

“Sometimes we ask candidate what systems they use and they may use a lot but not list them all,” she says. “That could mean they miss out when it’s an AI selection process. Another example is to make sure you review the job advertisement closely for key criteria and then look to respond by tailoring your CV and covering letter.”

Other tips: apply as early as possible for a job, well before the closing date; and make a follow-up phone call to alert an employer to your application. Devlin says employers often start interviews within the first few days of a job being open and an early application means you are competing for attention against a smaller field. The phone conversation is an opportunity for a focused elevator pitch about your interest in the job.

Devlin says confidence in a job interview is very important but preparation is the key.

She suggest you “take a step back” to assess what it is that you really want in a job; then work on being able to articulate your “unique proposition” to an employer. You need a good CV and covering letter, and you need that proactive approach to personal branding online. When it comes to the interview stage, you need to have done a lot of preparation so you can talk about the projects and situations have you managed.

“People are often quite humble about their abilities and don’t sell themselves,” says Devlin. “But they also often talk on what they would do if they got the job rather than talking about what they have done.”

She says it’s also important to understand the more general attributes employers are looking for – being proactive, communication skills and someone who others will enjoy working with.

Get the Job you Really Want, by Erin Devlin (Major Street Publishing, $29.95) is available here , or at www.people2people.com.au/resources , along with free CV, cover letter and career plan templates.