Engineer Employment Now

Here is a social media employment success story and why social media is so important for engineers. Many engineers especially older engineers (this includes me) have a “build it and they will come” attitude about their employment. As a result of this, they ignore a critical skill that our new world put upon us — social media.

There are a lot of posts on blogs about job recruitment. Lots of recruiters have things to say about it. They talk about their techniques. Why it works. Even to the point of being able to measure results. But an actual recruitment success story follows the following pattern.

A recruiter places a post on twitter looking to fill a job requisition. A few hours later she gets an email from Facebook from someone interested in the job because a friend of hers (the job prospect) told her about it. The link to Facebook account was found by following a link from the twitter profile. Next, she has a phone interview. Then, she comes in for her first round of in-person interviews and a few more interviews results in a job offer. All of this was done in just a few days.

The main importance to engineering employment is that community matters. Your online networks matter. Your relationships built up using Facebook and twitter are vitally important because recruiters and potential employers can use them now with very little cost.