Career Social Media Benefits Clients and Agencies

by Mike DeSousa

In 2007, I coined the term career social media to describe my activities in teaching job-seekers how to secure employment through the strategic use of FREE Internet-based programs, e.g.Facebook and LinkedIn, among many others. Your agency management and employment/settlement counsellors will greatly benefit from learning how to best use career social media to help your clients.

Career social media can help you to:

• Build community partnerships and engage clients
• Locate clients through outreach
• Forward jobs to your clients at lightning-speed
• Screen job applicants and hire the best candidates
• Fundraise through e-Commerce
• Research trends and share information with others in a timely manner
• Virtually mentor and empower clients
• Collaborate on professional and/or personal projects

Despite these benefits, the majority of non-profits do not train their staff on how to use or teach career social media. Given this lack of professional development and standards with respect to career social media, how can an organization ensure consistent staff learning and teaching standards and client service outcomes on social media for both their staff and their clients?

Many employment counsellor job postings now require proven experience in using social media to obtain employment outcomes, undertake community outreach, and ensure client satisfaction.  While workers and clients may have valid concerns for not using social media to market themselves, over time agencies and funders will require proficiency with social media programs from staff to secure employment for clients.

To ensure clients’ satisfaction, we must use social media to do more with less. We must use all the social media tools at our disposal. Here are some examples:

• Help employers recruit clients
• Decrease valuable time spent commuting to satellite locations
• Develop budgets and funding proposals at record speed
• Monitor competition and your real-time efforts in real time
• Better serve clients, and
• Rapidly distribute job postings to clients

By adopting social media in a strategic manner, agencies will see their client employability and client satisfaction outcomes go through the roof – giving our funders what they want, thus leading to renewed contracts.

What social media program(s) do you use, would you like to learn, or are planning to learn? Please share your answers, opinions and comments in ContactPoint’s LinkedIn Network or Career Developer Group.

As Canada’s Bilingual Career Social Media specialist, Mike DeSousa leads professional development workshops for management and settlement/employment staff across Canada on reaching clients with free social media. Mike has been described as ‘a highly engaging facilitator, an exceptional speaker, informative, and thoughtful’ who uses inclusive humour to teach. You can attend Mike’s workshop, “Outreach @ the Speed of Light” at Cannexus 2011 or contact him at desousamike@gmail.com or at (905) 767-7373.