So much has been written about the power of social media and your online persona to drive awareness and make or break your chances of winning your perfect job. As recruiters for accountants in the Greater Toronto Area, we have countless examples of clients saying to us that they will include or disregard certain candidates based on their social media profiles. We want to give you 3 real examples of client behavior:
- We submitted 4 candidates for a position. All were highly qualified and had LinkedIn profiles up. However, one candidate didn’t have a fully developed profile with his latest position as well as details under each role. The client decided not to interview them and stated that the candidate should know that everyone looks at LinkedIn as a reference point. The lesson: from the client perspective this candidate demonstrated a lack of interest in his career by not keeping his profile updated.
- We were engaged on multiple searches with a client and submitted several candidates. We immediately received messages from a few candidates informing us that their profiles were being reviewed by multiple contacts at the client company. The lesson: The team at Clarity found this interesting as it demonstrated the degree to which hiring agents and entire organizations view social media profiles as a key data point when screening and hiring accountants.
- We met a candidate and loved her personality and thought that she would be a great fit for a specific client who was hiring for an accounting and finance job. After calling the client and sending her resume over we received a message back saying that their social media profile wasn’t very “inspiring”. We probed for more detail on this broad statement and what came back was that there was a disconnect between what we were saying about the candidate and what the client “saw” online. In this type of position we are given a choice of backing off gracefully or gambling some of our credibility by pushing back. (we don’t like to gamble too often) In the end, we pressed hard for the client to meet the candidate and the interview was viewed as a success by both parties. The lesson: The client placed almost as much value on the candidate’s online persona as they did in the resume combined with our opinion.
The examples above are real and there are countless others that we could talk about. We wanted to share this with you and let you know that if you are searching for a job and match any of the 3 scenarios above then you should plan a “social media face-lift” right away!
