How Strong is Your Executive Brand Online for Job Search?

Aside from your LinkedIn profile – if you have one – how many relevant search results will executive recruiters and hiring decision makers find when they Google “your name”?

If you have no compelling search results supporting your executive brand, or your online footprint consists only of your LinkedIn profile, you may be sabotaging your chances of being noticed and qualified as a good-fit candidate.

The vast majority of executive recruiters use social recruiting (social networks and social media) to source and assess top talent.

The more relevant, diverse, and brand-consistent search results they find about you, the more likely you’ll be viewed as a valuable potential candidate, positioning you above those who are invisible online.

According to Jobvite’s 2013 Social Recruiting Survey of 1,600 recruiting and human resources professionals:

94% use or plan to use social media in their recruitment efforts
78% have made a hire through social media

Using a marketer’s approach, “recruiters now focus on building their own talent pool and appealing to candidates’ individual preferences.”

LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are their most used social networks, but others are emerging – blogs, Youtube, GitHub, Stackoverflow, Yammer, and Instagram.

But LinkedIn is still their number one go-to spot for searching (96%), contacting (94%), vetting (92%), and keeping tabs on candidates (93%).

What are executive recruiters looking for when social recruiting?

They’re searching for the right professional experience, tenure, hard skills, industry-related voice, and cultural fit for the companies they serve.

And candidates’ online presence and social media activities provide social proof, lending credibility to the claims they’ve made about themselves verbally, and in their executive resume and other career materials.

Hiring decision makers find that candidates are less likely to “exaggerate” on social media than in their resumes, because they’re putting that information out there, for the world to scrutinize.

Recruiters are finding increasing value in the content on candidates’ social profiles:

42% have re-considered a candidate based on what they found, resulting in both positive and negative re-assessments.
Grammatical errors, profanity, and other inappropriate behaviors provoked negative recruiter reactions more than 60% of the time.

What makes social recruiting so valuable to executive recruiters?

It takes less time, is much more cost effective, and yields a greater number of qualified candidates than other methods.

According to the survey, 43% spend less than $1,000 per month on social recruiting, but 60% estimate the value of hires through social media as greater than $20,000 per year. 20% estimate it at greater than $90,000 per year.

Because recruiters turn to social media on an ongoing basis, to amass a pool of talent to dip into when needed, it becomes more evident that you are being searched well before you get the call or email inviting you to interview.

If your online presence is non-existent or nearly so, you need to get to work building relevant search results supporting your personal brand and value to your target employers, to stand out above your competitors.

Read my post, Online Presence and Personal Brand Management: 5 Things to Remember, for ideas . . . and get cracking.

5 Key Elements of a Strong Online Personal Brand

Best of Blogging Your Personal Brand for C-level Executive Jobs

How Google-Friendly is Your Personal Brand?