Episode 38: Social media for your graduate job search, with Marielle Kelly

January 22, 2016 Podcast

In episode 38 of the Graduate Job Podcast, we cover how to effectively use social media in your graduate job search, as I speak with careers advisor, author and social media expert Marielle Kelly. We examine everything you need to know to utilise social media tools to help you get a graduate job, covering Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and everything in-between. From how to create the profiles, through to using them to research companies, reach out to people, and to make a mark online. It doesn’t matter if you’re a social media demon, or complete newbie, we have something in this episode to blow your socks off. As always, all links to everything we discuss and a full transcript are available in the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/marielle. Before we start a quick request from me, your feedback helps me to create the episodes you want to hear, so I’ve set up a super simple and very quick survey, as I want the show to best serve your needs. It’s got 5 questions and will take you a minute, so please check it out at http://www.graduatejobpodcast.com/survey/ . I look forward to hearing your thoughts. But in the meantime, let’s crack on with the show.

MORE SPECIFICALLY IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN ABOUT:

  • The social media tools that you should be using in your graduate job search
  • How to create an amazing LinkedIn profile as a graduate job seeker
  • How to connect to employers using LinkedIn
  • Why you need to be on Twitter
  • Top tips for using Twitter to boost your job search
  • How to build connections in any industry using social media
  • Why you should definitely think about starting a blog

SELECTED LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

  • The Start Up of You – Marielle’s book recommendation. Click on the image below to buy NOW from Amazon.

Transcript – Episode 38: Social media for your graduate job search, with Marielle Kelly

Announcer: Welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast, your home for weekly information and inspiration to help you get the graduate job of your dreams.

James: Hello and welcome to the Graduate Job Podcast, with your host James Curran. The Graduate Job Podcast is your weekly home for all things related to helping you on your journey to finding that amazing job. Each week I bring together the best minds in the industry, speaking to leading authors, entrepreneurs, coaches and bloggers who bring decades of experience into a byte size weekly 30 minute show. Put simply, this is the show I wish I had a decade ago when I graduated.




In episode 38 of the Graduate Job Podcast, we cover how to effectively use social media in your graduate job search, as I speak with careers advisor, author and social media expert Marielle Kelly. We examine everything you need to know to utilise social media tools to help you get a graduate job, covering Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and everything in-between. From how to create the profiles, through to using them to research companies, reach out to people, and to make a mark online. It doesn’t matter if you’re a social media demon, or complete newbie, we have something in this episode to blow your socks off. As always, all links to everything we discuss and a full transcript are available in the show notes at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/marielle. Before we start a quick request from me, your feedback helps me to create the episodes you want to hear, so I’ve set up a super simple and very quick survey, as I want the show to best serve your needs. It’s got 5 questions and will take you a minute, so please check it out at http://www.graduatejobpodcast.com/survey/ . I look forward to hearing your thoughts. But in the meantime, let’s crack on with the show.

James: We are very pleased today to welcome Marielle Kelly, careers advisor at Trinity College in Dublin, independent careers coach, and author of the excellent new book, ‘Social Media for your Student and Graduate Job Search.’ Marielle, welcome to the graduate job podcast.

Marielle: Thank-you very much and thanks for having me on your show today.

James: It’s a pleasure. Today we are going to dive in and look at all things social media related. But, before we do, would you like to give us a brief introduction into how you came to be a careers advisor and author?

Marielle: Absolutely. So I had a sort of a meandering journey to become a careers adviser.  I always wanted to do work that helped people but I didn’t really know what that would look like, so I did a few different things. I worked in homeless services, I worked in not for profit–working with immigrants trying to find work, and I just became very interested in helping people to figure out where they want to go next. Finding that a lot of people don’t realise their potential, and I just really enjoy working with people to understand who they are, what they’ve got and where they can go. So I went off and did the career counselling qualification, and I’ve been working here now in Trinity for three years, and the book came about because I went to a talk on social media years ago, and it just really made me see how exciting social media can be, how helpful it can be for people looking for work, and I wasn’t really planning on writing a book about it but an offer came my way, so I took it up and I found myself writing the book and here we are now.

James: Excellent, it’s a great little book and we’ll be linking to it in the show notes. You’ll be able to check out the book and everything we talk about today at the show notes which are at graduatejobpodcast.com. So, starting at the beginning, before we dive into the specific different tools, lets take a step back and look at social media as a whole. So, Marielle, why is it important for applicants to be using social media in their graduate job search?

Marielle: It’s important for so many reasons, James. We can spend the whole time talking about the general reasons why, but I suppose the first thing is, social media gives people access to huge volumes of information to help them in their job search. It’s really revolutionised things for students looking for work because you can go and find social media accounts of companies on different platforms, you can see what they’re talking about, what their business is about, and that’s really important when you’re trying to sell yourself to a company and to explain why you really want to work for them, which is one of the hardest things to do sometimes. So that information is so useful. Just for applications, for interviews. The other thing that’s really, really good is that it gives you the chance to find other people who are doing the work that you would love to do, and before people had to rely on career websites that said this is what you do in this particular job, whereas now you can go into LinkedIn, you can search for professionals doing a certain job title, you can look at their LinkedIn profile, you can see what they’re doing, what they’re writing about in their profile, what they’re doing everyday in their job. You get loads of more realistic, up to date information about what’s actually involved in a job that you’re thinking of doing. Then beyond that then, you could consider contacting those people, to talk to them, ask them more about their world, get some advice, so it just opens up huge waves of information and also, huge opportunities for talking to people, for finding out a lot more about what’s out there, and that’s really, really helpful when you’re trying to decide, ‘What am I going to do after college? What’s the best job for me?’ So, it’s fantastically useful in that way.




James: We actually got in touch with each other–I contacted Marielle by Twitter, so it’s a great way to reach out and to speak to people without a gate-keeper or receptionist being in between, so you can make that initial contact.

Marielle: Absolutely.

James: I did like your comment in the book, that don’t expect social media to be a magic wand which will have jobs falling at your feet. The thing that’s important for listeners to realise is, that this is something that does take effort and you have got to put the work in to create an online social media presence, which is going to make you stand out from the crowd.

Marielle: Exactly, it’s not the one thing that’s going to make everything happen, it’s a very nice addition to your job searches. It’s a very nice, extra source of information and extra source of ways to network and it’s also a great way to profile yourself, so it’s not going to necessarily lead to a job, but it can help you to position yourself better for that job because you understand better, and it can also help you to come across well, increasingly there’s so many pieces of research coming out in the last couple of years about the extent to which employers are looking up prospective candidates online, so social media, if you spend time on it, if you create a good profile, it gives you chance to present a really good image of yourself when they look you up, so they don’t just come across maybe, dodgy Facebook photographs, or nothing at all. It gives you a chance to show them who you are when they look you up and that’s very important as well.

James: You mentioned an interesting word there, ‘image.’ You talked in the book about the importance about building a brand as you use social media, and making sure that it’s a consistent across the different platforms. Why is this important?

Marielle: First of all, I hate the word ‘brand’, I used it because it’s the term that people use for these things. The ‘brand’, it’s sort of a horrible word and I think that in the book as well, people can be a bit adversed to it, selling yourself, packaging yourself, branding yourself. But if you step away from thinking of that– a product-marketing kind of view, and just think about who am I and what have I got to offer, and students I find, find that quite difficult. There can be a tendency to go, well, I’m just like everybody else on my course, I can just do what they do, and I like the same things, and I’m not better or different to anybody else. Whereas every single person, even within a small class, has different areas that they’re really strong on, different personality types, and different tasks that they’re more drawn to. So when you’re trying to say to an employer, I’m the person that you want, you can say that on a cover letter, you can show them in your CV, but if they look you up online and they’re finding that you’re tweeting lots of articles that are maybe related to their industry, or if they’re getting a really good sense of your personality, hopefully in a positive way, from the things that you’re sharing online, it can give them a better sense of who you are, how you might fit, that’s a really big deal for companies, they’re assessing not just for skills, they’re assessing  for how are you going to fit with their culture, so they can go online and find across your different profiles, you are coming across consistently as somebody who is serious about their career, who’s really interested in their particular area. It can just give that extra reassurance that this applicant is really serious and that they really want to be with us, because that’s another concern for companies when they’re hiring, they’re wondering does this person want any job or do they want our job, and will they stay with us. So if you can create this impression online that you’re a person who is really, properly interested in what they do, that can really help to bolster up your application.

James: I completely agree, and one of the things you mentioned there was something I find with the clients that I coach, specifically ones that are recently out of university, is that they have difficulty with picking out the things that are different and special about themselves, and one of the things I hear often is I don’t have the experience or, I’m not really sure what I’m good at. How can listeners begin to understand what they’re skills and unique selling points are?

Marielle: Well, there’s loads of different resources out there for that and I think it’s really important to spend the time, looking at, what are my skills? What are my values? What’s my personality,? What’s my interests? That’s the things that make people different and there’s a lot of different assessments out there that you can do, so FindingPotential for example is a really great free online personality assessment test, and that will give you a sense of what are the different kind of tasks that I like, you can do interest assessments, O-NET has a really good one or you can do career reports, prospects has a really good assessment you can do, often it won’t uncover anything new, but it will confirm for you OK, this is where I am particularly strong, this is what I don’t like so much but I’m very interested in, and when you see that often, that’s when you can go, oh that’s what’s different, because I’m more this way than other people who did this assessment. That’s quite helpful to make people start to say OK, I’m not just like everybody else. One thing that I hear a lot from students, unbelievably regularly is, I can’t do anything. These are students who come into me who have been, not just doing their course and getting good grades, they’ve been participating in society, they’ve been volunteering, they might have picked up a part-time job, and they have this idea that they can’t do anything which is so sad and so inaccurate so it’s really important for people to do something like a skills audit or go and talk to your careers advisor, they’re there to help you and one of the best kind of ways of uncovering your skills is to actually discuss your experience with somebody else, because often we can be blind to not what we have done ourselves, but what we can do with somebody else, like a skilled careers advisor who can listen to you and pick out the key things. The key skills that you’re displaying can be really, really helpful for you to put your experience in context, and I think part of why I wrote the book. There’s a lot of books out there for general job seekers who want to use social media, but it’s a lot easier to profile yourself when you’ve had a consistent professional experience. It’s a bit harder to know how to take your experience as a student and put that into business terms, so that’s what the book was necessary to write, to really helps students with that aspect.

James: I completely agree and it’s a really important step that listeners need to do, thinking about what it is that they want to be projecting, and be famous for when they go for those interviews, and start applying for jobs, it does make it a lot easier further down the line.




Marielle: Definitely.

James: So, spinning it around then, and thinking about the companies themselves, how are they currently using social media to get in front of the listeners?

Marielle: Yeah, they’re using it in lots of different ways. It’s completely changed the hiring landscape really, and what they’re doing is, they’re trying to–We always hear students worry about getting a job, but companies are very worried about getting the right people as well, so they spent huge amounts of money and time trying to position themselves as the most attractive employer to the best students, and so they use it in lots of different ways so they will have for example, a LinkedIn company page, and actually if you are on LinkedIn and you go to certain company pages, what you see on that company’s page on LinkedIn will actually depend on the key words that are in your own profile, they tailor what you see based on what you say you can do and are interested in.

James: I didn’t know that.

Marielle: Yeah, the very advanced algorithms. I don’t know the ins and outs of it but some of the companies, the bigger companies would invest money into creating those kinds of tailored experiences on LinkedIn, so the very basic company information, but then you’ve got things like some companies would run Twitter campaigns where they would be encouraging people to–They might have a campaign, such as #mygraduatejobsearch or something and say tweet your best advice or something, they’re trying to get students to engage with their brand, they really want people to know who they are, and want to be part of their company and their culture, and then on Facebook sometimes you’ll find companies have actual simulation games that they use, so the example I gave in the book, one of them was the Marriott hotel for example, they had a running your own hotel simulation game and based on that people can see that this is a place I might actually enjoy, so it’s a fun way of trying out a job but it’s trying to always find different ways of communicating and it’s a whole new market. This whole idea of how do we as companies use social media to get our brand across so, as hard as students are trying to do that, companies are trying just as hard on the other side to grab your attention and make you think that they’re really interesting and good to work for.

James: And you mentioned LinkedIn there which is the big daddy of social media and the job-seeking world. Why is it so vital for listeners to make sure that they’re on LinkedIn and have a decent LinkedIn profile?

Marielle: I think that it’s a good distinction being on LinkedIn for versus having a decent profile, when I go into class I always ask people “Who’s on LinkedIn?” and most hands will go up, and then I’ll say “Who has a good profile?” and maybe one or two hesitant hands will go up, why is it important? It’s important because it’s the first thing people are going to see if they Google your name and see you have a LinkedIn profile. That’s going to be one of the first links that comes up in a search result. So, straight away the first thing employers will see is a professional presence, it’s important for so many reasons, but first of all it’s your chance to portray yourself in a really professional context online. It’s so much more than just an online CV, it’s not just somewhere you dump all your information and leave it sitting there, it’s quite dynamic. LinkedIn is about making connections, so you’re presenting yourself in a more personal way than you would in a CV, you have a profile picture which is essential so straight away people can see you and connect with the image you’re projecting, things like the summary where you can talk to anyone who’s reading your profile and tell them who you are or what matters to you, it’s like a cover letter to the world so it’s a nice way to present yourself there in a personal way. It’s also incredibly useful in terms of your network, so I wish LinkedIn had been around for my whole professional life because it’s a very good way, anytime you meet somebody at an event or a conference, you can connect with them afterwards on LinkedIn and you might not have any needs to talk to them, or they might not have any needs to talk to you immediately, but it could be that later down the line you are thinking of working for a particular company and you see they’re there now, you can contact them and ask them for advice, but where the real value comes in is how it can really expand your network, so we all know a certain amount of people and we generally have an idea of what most of them do, but we don’t know everyone that we know, who they know, it’s very complicated. So LinkedIn can also show your second connections, the people who are connected to the people that you know so the more people you are connected to on LinkedIn, the more second connections you have, and that’s a huge extra circle of resources that you can access. So, if for example a student is really interested in working for a particular company, I don’t want to name any companies because I don’t want to get into any trouble, because they identify a particular company, they want to work there, they don’t know anybody in their company, they´ve been going to LinkedIn, search for people working at that company and the first result that you will see are people who are your second connections. So you could find your friend knows somebody working in that company, and you can get in touch with them, and say look I know you know X, he’s working where I want to work, do you think it would be possible for you to introduce me to him so I could have a chat before I put in my application? I’ve seen that work time and time again for students where they’ve gotten in touch with somebody completely out of the blue, via a mutual connection, and people have been really, really helpful to talk them through the interview process, talking through what really matters to the company, what kind of things they can talk about that can really stand out, and again it’s that process of, you might not realise yourself some of your experience, how interesting that could be to a company, so getting to talk to somebody who’s in there could be really, really useful. Not everyone is going to reply, I’m constantly telling my students to go and talk to people working in those companies and they say, but what if they don´t reply to me, and I say that’s OK, it’s not the end of the world, you might send out ten different tailored requests and only get one response, but that one response could be the most incredibly useful, and most useful contact that you make.

James: In my experience people do tend to underestimate just how willing people are to speak and I’ve done this several times when I’ve been looking for different jobs, and people I didn’t even know very well would put me in touch with people that they knew and those people, were willing to give up half an hour, an hour to speak to me about the job and let me know what it was really like, and it was so powerful when you went into the interview and they said why do you want to work here? I was able to say I spoke to so and so who was on the graduate scheme and they told me about all these great things, and it just makes you stand out as someone who puts the extra effort in and does things that other people won’t which is what companies are looking for.

Marielle: Absolutely, it’s such a struggle, I see it a lot with students who, with interviews, with cover letters, the piece about why I want to work for that company, that can be really difficult, especially some of the big companies they can seem quite similar from the outside, but every company believes that they’re very, very different and much better than all the others, so if you are able to find out what it is that they believe is really important to them, you can get some of that from their website, from their social media, but if you can talk to somebody, it’s so much more real I suppose, so you can go into that interview with a real sense of this is why this company is different and then talk about why you fit with that. Like you say, it makes you stand out if you can say I actually spoke to somebody from the company, I was really impressed with what they had to say about working here because that says I’m really serious, I really want to work for you.

James: So, going back to LinkedIn at the beginning and setting up a decent all-star profile, what would be your top tips for what to include and what not to include?

Marielle: Top tips for what to include, definitely a profile picture. It’s so important because there’s no point having a LinkedIn profile without a profile picture, and because it becomes very impersonal then straight away. But definitely, get a photograph up there, get somebody else to take a photograph of you, please not a selfie, I’ve seen horrendous things, most LinkedIn profile pictures are fairly average or borderline questionable, but it’s very easy to get it right and put a simple, professional photograph of yourself up there. Don’t worry about head-shots, a great thing societies do in colleges actually, is the photography society– It will take head-shots of people for LinkedIn and that’s a really–Definitely take that up if you can, because it’s generally quite good value, but you don’t need a professional picture, just a picture where people can see you and you look friendly and approachable, that’s all you’re worried about, definitely adjusting your headline, so your headline is the piece of information that comes up in the search result and your name and decide your photograph and that will be automatically populate about what you put in your profile. You can edit that so instead of just saying you’re a student at university of X, you can say history of art student, or fluent French speaker, or something that just says a little more about who you are straight away. The summary is the one that people need neglect a lot, it’s definitely maybe the hardest part to get right, but I think its the most important because that is the personal piece where you’re setting forward your stall and saying hi this is what I can do, this is what I’m interested in, looking for work, you can contact me here, its really important to spend a bit of time on that, it doesn’t have to be long, it can be a paragraph it can be 2 paragraphs, but it’s definitely important to spend time writing it, a good introduction for yourself. That can be something that people read a bit more than other parts of the profile. Then you want to get into any experience that you have, you don’t have to throw everything onto the LinkedIn profile, you don’t put your babysitting job, but if you’re working part-time in a shop and you can talk about the volume of sales that you’re dealing with, you know all that kind of stuff that you’ll put into a CV, so definitely fill out any professional experience that you have. Filling out any voluntary experience you have is incredibly important I always say to people when we’re looking at CV’s or cover letters, step away from categorising your experience based on whether they were paid or unpaid because that’s not really what matters, what matters is what was the experience, did you display skills? So anywhere that you displayed skills, write about that, if your voluntary experience is more significant and relevant than your paid experience, you can move the voluntary section up so that the first thing people see, or you can write about your volunteering experience under the experience section and just mention that you were volunteering, there’s different ways of highlighting that. You definitely need to then think of what are your core skills. So there’s the skills section, and you can pick out your key skills and list them there people can endorse you for them, its things that can be helpful but really its a great way of saying I’ve thought about what I can do and here’s my key skills that I would bring. And try to focus more on the harder skills, I often see time management, team work, that kind of stuff, it doesn’t really add a huge amount to a profile so try and think more about core skills and thinks like Microsoft Word or speaking a language or using a particular computer program, any specific knowledge areas that you might have. So, that’s where you can really reaffirm who you say you are and what you have to give, and then definitely joining groups is really useful as well, so again say you’re thinking of working in financial services, if you’re joining different groups which are related to careers in the financial services that again provides further evidence that you’re serious, or if I’m a company in the financial sector and see you’re in lots of groups to do with my sector, and you say that this person is serious about it. It’s another way of saying that I’m really serious and I want to do what I say I want to do. And then connecting with people, so you need to have at least 50 connections to have an all star profile on LinkedIn. You know that’s pretty easy, to get to 50, so connecting with any of your classmates, anyone that you’ve ever worked with before, anyone from your school, it can be quite easy to build up to 50 connections, and always, always, always, send a personalised connection request, it’s just so important because LinkedIn is about your network, it’s about the people around you that can help you, that you can help, so don’t just send the awful, generic, I’d like to add you to my professional network, it’s quite lazy. You just take a minute and personalise the note slightly, it can help to continue building those relationships, so definitely always send a personal request, even if you know the person really well.




James: I completely agree, and although it’s such a basic mistake to make is– If you get a LinkedIn request that has the basic blurb. Although this morning I was trying to connect with someone in LinkedIn and sometimes you click the connect button and it pops up with a, where you can tailor the blurb, and sometimes you click connect and it says message sent, oh no, knowing it’s just sent an automated message.

Marielle: I’ve had people apologise before for that within workshops on LinkedIn, but they’ve gone “Oh god, I can’t believe I’ve just sent you that,” but what happens is if you search for people by name, that come up in a list, you’ll find lots of different accounts with the same name or similar names coming up and if you click connect there, that’s where the automatic message goes through. Whereas, if you click on their name, go through to their profile, and then click the connect button there, you can then get the option to personalise come up at that point. The other thing is, when you try to connect with somebody, LinkedIn will ask how you know the person, so if you have some connections with them, if you went to college with them or if you worked with them somewhere you’ve listed on your profile, you can say that. If you don’t have any of those obvious connections they will ask you for an email address in order to put the connection request through, so in that case, and this is something I wish I’d written in the book and it’s been annoying me ever since, if you can’t connect with them on LinkedIn because you don’t have their email address, there’s no harm in if you’ve found a person that you want to connect with for some reason and you don’t know them, you don’t have their email address, just get in touch with the company and say I was looking for a contact address for this person and more often than nothing they’ll give that to you. That’s a way of working around it, if you can’t get through straight away.

James: That’s a really good point. We talked about making connections with alumni, can you talk us through about the how to use a find an alumni function, because this was something that I wasn’t aware of but it’s such a brilliant idea.

Marielle: Yeah, the alumni function is one of the best things to happen on social media I just think its an amazing amazing tool. So the alumni tool basically, you can go into that and once you’ve listed that you’re in a certain university on linked in it will bring you to the alumni page for your university. There you will see the profiles for every single alumni from your university who is on LinkedIn and you can then filter that, so you can filter it according to where they live, you can filter it according to what work they do, you can filter it according to what company they work for, what they say they’re good at, what skills they use, what they studied, so it’s an incredible alumni database and why that matters is because an alumni connection is a warmer connection in contacting somebody cold, so if you’re thinking after graduating I really want to move to Paris and I want to work in a library there, and you could go, you could filter the alumni according to who lives in Paris, or France and then you could say you know where they work, you could put in library as a key word, filter that down until you find anybody there, and then it’s a matter of sending the message, I came across your profile, I see you’re doing this work, I’m thinking of moving to Paris, I’d love to have a chat with you. So it just gives you a basis I suppose to contacting somebody you’re less of a stranger, out in the cold I suppose, and it’s so useful as well for finding out where people have gone from my course, universities have a certain amount of information but it can give you over time where people have gone, if you want to find alumni working at a specific company or if you’re thinking OK I think I kind of like to do this type of work, but I’ve no idea what’s actually involved. You can then look through the alumni database of people doing that job and contact them that way, so it’s just a huge, huge help really in understand where can I go and who are the people I have no immediate connections with that I could potentially contact for some information and advice, so I just think it’s fantastic.

James: Definitely. And it’s a reason in itself just to be on LinkedIn, so make sure you followed all the advice there and get yourself up to the all star level. So, Marielle, moving on next to Twitter. Why is Twitter a good tool for job hunting?

Marielle: I love Twitter, I think Twitter is brilliant and I’m actually surprised to find that a lot of students don’t. Often I will be teaching people how to use Twitter, which I find bizarre because I’m usually the oldest person in the room, so I find it weird that I’m the one teaching them all how to use it, but it is an incredible, it’s a very vibrant place, there’s so much happening. I think the media, the attention that’s given to Twitter it’s given twists how people see it. So people think it’s always celebrities and gossip and all that kind of rubbish, and that’s there, and that’s fine, but there are whole communities of professionals who are on there everyday, who are talking about their jobs, who are sharing interesting articles, who are very happy to connect for the most part. Twitter is a very conversational platform, like you said early, it takes away the gatekeeper, so you could find somebody who you want to talk to, or just find somebody who’s really advanced in the field who’s sharing useful information, and you can just follow them, you don’t ever even have to talk to them if you don’t want to. You can just follow them to get a great source of information, but it can also lead to conversations and it can be easier to connect sometimes on Twitter than on LinkedIn. And it just gives you a sense of what’s happening in that sector, what’s the hot topic that everyone’s discussing, which is really useful when you’re going for an interview, when people say why do you want to work in this area or do you know what the latest trends are, you can really show that you’ve got an oversight of an industry which can be difficult when you’re outside of it when you’re in college and you don’t have that much access to what’s really going on in that company when you’re in that industry. Twitter can give you this kind of constant stream of news and information and you can see what’s really important right now in that area and its so, so useful. I would recommend following a mix of people who are career advisers, just to get career advice. Then people who are actually working in that sector, the thing with Twitter is it can get quite overwhelming very very fast because there’s a lot of people on there a lot of interesting people and you can end up following huge amounts of people and then find it very hard to really keep up with everything and so the thing that’s really useful is twitter lists so you can categorise interesting accounts according to feeds, so say one day you just want to go in and read some interesting stuff, you can have a list that is just interesting accounts. So, I have one for example called reading room. That’s where I have the Harvard Business Review or Forbes and all those accounts for when I just want to go in and read random, interesting articles, what’s happening in the world, but then have a list of PR professionals for example, so you can find loads of PR professionals and put them all in a list so at this moment in time what you want to do is find out what are people talking about in the PR industry you just click on that list and read it. So, you can really tailor what you’re reading and I think it’s really important to do that because otherwise Twitter can be quite overwhelming and off-putting. So in order to get the most out of it, organising who you’re following can really help matters.

James: That’s a really good idea, it’s one I’m going to have to do because my Twitter feed at the moment is getting very, very busy. Although, word if warning it does, when you put people in lists, it does notify the person that they’ve been put in the list. So, make sure the list title is not derogatory.

Marielle: Yes, definitely. And then its a really good way of getting someone’s attention as well if you put them into a category that has a nice name. I found I was following so many people I just couldn’t keep up and I started adding people to lists and sometimes without even following them, because I just click into lists and sometimes I’ll put people into lists and then they’ll end up following me and we’ll end up having a conversation. There is one way of doing it which is the private so if you create a private list. People wont get a notification when they’re added to that, its more useful really for companies I suppose but if you were trying to follow competitors, you could set up a private list and people wouldn’t know that you added them.

James: Yeah, that’s a good point. Going back to the earlier point that you made is, I think Twitter is a really good way for you to begin to understand the language that’s used in the particular industries that you’re thinking about because when you got for the interview and you’re able to use the same acronyms, use the same terms, you’ve immediately made yourself look as if you belong within that industry, within that group which will go a long way in terms of the interviewers mind and in making them see it’s as if you’re already part of the business, because, as you mentioned there’s a student you’re very removed from the industry and what’s going on, so it’s a good way to put yourself right in it and make yourself feel at home.




Marielle: Definitely. It’s a really good point, its a really minor thing, it doesn’t take long to catch on to those things, but it can, like you say, put you in a position in the recruiters mind that you’re already there, that you’re a natural fit, that you get what they’re talking about and that you know their language, so that’s a really good point.

James: So, for a graduate job seeker what would a good Twitter profile look like?

Marielle: A good Twitter profile, I suppose if you start with what it doesn’t include, it doesn’t include lots of text speak, lots of spelling errors, loads of references to skipping work, or a lecture, or anything that makes you look like an irresponsible person first of all, needs to be not there. Also, just the general tone, Twitter gets a bad rap because there can be lots of negativity out there, there’s a lot of bullying, and bad stuff on Twitter so, it doesn’t have to be that way, it’s also a very positive place so making sure what you’re putting across is positive, and not just using Twitter to be complaining about things, I see some Twitter feeds of people and its just like ‘hey @company, my parcel hasn’t arrived’ or ‘hey @company, I had a terrible experience with your organisation’. That’s fine to use on Twitter, but it doesn’t put you in a particularly positive light, if I’m an employer I don’t want to hire somebody who’s just giving it all the time. So, the first thing is really staying away from anything really negative or any kind of dodgy photographs or anything derogatory in any way. And then just, having a photograph so people can identify who you are and sharing different, just tweeting about anything really as long as it’s positive. It doesn’t have to be career focused, the most important thing is that it’s positive if you are tweeting. Then if you want to go to the next level then its about sharing articles which are interesting related to the area you’re in, sharing your thoughts yourself on it, if you have a blog you can be sharing blog posts. But just keeping it really quite positive and focused I suppose.

James: Yeah, and would you recommend having two profiles, or a personal one which maybe doesn’t have your name so people can instantly identify who you are, and then having a professional one? Or merging the two together but just being more circumspect about the things you put on it?

Marielle: Yeah, I’ve been asked that before and to be honest with you, I don’t know, maybe it’s just me but I would find it hard to keep up two different Twitter accounts. It’s enough trying to keep up with one. So, unless you have some sort of need to have a second account where you’re doing lots of complaining, I would just keep it to the one, you can tweet personal stuff, you can tweet about your holidays, you can tweet about Friday night, talking about alcohol or you can tweet about whatever you’re up to socially or if you really want to tweet your dinner photographs or whatever, that’s fine, you don’t have to have a purely career focused feed at all, so it’s actually better to mix in a bit of personality as well, then people can get a better sense of you. So, I would just have the one account and just keep things above board and pleasant and it should be OK.

James: That’s a good idea. So, what would be the best way for people to begin to make those first interactions with people on Twitter?

Marielle: I suppose to just get on there and start searching for the accounts. You can put in the keywords search for accounts that feature certain words so, if you want to work in conservation, just put in conservation and see what accounts come up. There any interesting people there that you could follow, from then you can then look at who they’re following, are they following other interesting people, you could follow them, and people will follow you back automatically when you start following them and that’s actually another thing that I’m really annoyed I forgot to write in the book, but that moment of connection is a really useful moment. So, if somebody follows you, you can go that’s great, that person’s following me, but that’s a dead in the water kind of connection, so it’s a good opportunity to write to them, to say “Hey, thanks for following me, I really enjoy your Twitter feed.” So, then you’re building a report so you could potentially later on want to talk to them about something else but it is such a nice casual social platform that you can really be engaged with them at any stage if you were say you came across a really interesting thing that somebody shared, you could then share that tweet and you could tag them in it and say love this article by X and the others know that you’re mentioning them and that’s another way of building report on Twitter.

James: I really love the advice about making the most of that initial moment when people follow you back to make an impression, that’s a really good idea. You talk in the book, and again I thought it was a brilliant idea, how you could search people who were doing specific jobs, working in specific companies and using that as a way into making that initial contact and begin networking with them.

Marielle: Yeah, absolutely. So you can search for that company name, and look for accounts that have the company name listed in them, or you could find that there’s a lot of professionals out there who are blogging or writing articles for The Huffington Post or whatever, so you might be reading a really interesting article, somebody giving you advice on how to do the assessment interview for a big consulting company and that could be from somebody in the company, you could look them up on Twitter, you could follow them, if they’re already writing out there and sharing advice, chances are they might have quite an interesting twitter feed or blog that you could be following. Being aware, as you visit different websites, who are the authors, what are they saying, are they interesting people, and then seeing do they have a social media account, usually they will link to it under the article, but that’s a really good way of keeping on top of what the different leaders in your field are talking about and then you can very easily send them a tweet, saying I really like your article, or, you can, if they follow you back, you can send them a direct message but you don’t even need to go to that level, you can just start on Twitter, but be aware that anything you say, any tweets that you send out, unless you have a private account, anybody can read so if its coming up to sort of interview time, you don’t want to have loads of public tweets to lots of different companies because if a recruiter looks you up and they think you’re tweeting every single person you can find, and about twenty different companies, that’s not going to give a great message to them, they’re going to think you just want any job, which may be true, but you don’t want to let them know, so you just balance that out, and maybe take it to LinkedIn if you want to have more of an in depth conversation with somebody.

James: That’s really good advice, and you mentioned blogging there which tends to be the forgotten cousin of the social media world. Why should listeners be thinking about creating a blog?

Marielle: I think blogging is a more intensive practice I suppose, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, you can just dip in and out. Blogging takes a bit more time. Why it’s useful is for loads of reasons, again but, it shows consistency. So, if you’re consistently blogging about something, it shows that you can take the time to work on a project by yourself, not because you’re trying to get grades, or not because you’re trying to get anywhere in particular, it’s just your interests and you’re consistently working on that project in your spare time, so that straight way, that’s your ability to manage an extra project on top of everything else that’s going on with your coursework and any other extra-curricular that you have, it’s a really good way of showing that you’ve got good writing skills, it’s so important to be able to communicate well in writing, not everybody is good at it, not even people that go through colleges, they’re not always good at it by the end and companies often say they want people with good communication skills and it can be very hard to provide evidence, or you can say something about it in your CV, but if they can see online a really good example of your writing, that’s really, really better and much more powerful than a line in a CV just referring to the fact that you believe you can write well. It doesn’t have to be about anything to do with your job whatsoever, it could be career focused, you could be writing all about what its like to work in a certain company. In the street you could be interviewing people who work in that industry, writing about that. That’s absolutely fine, that’s great. But if you’re interested in something completely outside of what you want to fit into, if you’re really into, I don’t know, horse-riding or video games or something you could be blogging about that. It’s just that kind of commitment to a project and that ability to confidently put your thoughts out there which can be difficult for students sometimes because they can say Oh I don’t have anything to say. Whereas everybody does, so it can show that you have the confidence to put forth an opinion out there and that’s quite attractive as well.

James: As you said in the book, throughout the whole graduate recruitment process, don’t tell, show. So if you can, if you say I’m really interested in the aviation industry, and you’ve got a blog where every week you talk about what’s interesting you in the aviation industry and you’ve been doing it for six months or a year, you could just point the recruiter in that direction and they know that there’s someone who is really passionate and really interested about the job and it’ll make you stand out?

Marielle: It’s there for the taking, anyone can do it, but most people don’t. So it’s an avenue to really make yourself stand out, really make yourself an interesting candidate, and somebody with something a bit different offer.

James: And we had backing episode seven, we had the PR expert and recruiter Sarah Stimson on, and she recruited for a charity that did PR internships and the scheme was called the Taylor Bennett foundation, and she said the first thing that all the interns did when they joined was they had to create a blog. She said in PR it was so important and so useful to have your own blog and talk about different advertisement campaigns, or whatever it was but just to be able to have your own independent voice that you could show to recruiters, again it really made you stand out.

Marielle: Definitely.




James: So, moving on to two of the smaller, maybe less obvious social media sites, for looking for jobs. Pinterest and Instagram. How would you recommend using these platforms, Marielle?

Marielle: Yeah, so Pinterest and Instagram, they’re definitely not going to be central to your work unless you’re in a more kind of the creative industry. But they’re very useful there so it can be an online portfolio where you’re sharing, say, if you want to go into photography, you can be using Instagram to show off your photographs, although it might not be the most professional platform for it, it’s a good way to show off your aesthetic, what you’re interested in, connecting with other people who are sharing different images which are in the same kind of area as yours, giving feedback. Pinterest is really useful, it is a kind of online bulletin board basically where you can save everything. I’m really bad at using the favourites tab,  I’m just really bad at it, I don’t know why I always forget to use it and I can never find anything again. Whereas Pinterest, you can actually create themed boards where you’re gathering all these useful websites which are to do with different areas of interest for you. So it’s really nice way of organising the things you want to refer back to. So, say you want to get a job working in a charity. You might have a Pinterest board that’s interesting charity articles so you could be reading different things about charities, different newspapers or websites or whatever. You can be pinning those to the one place so that if you’re going for a job in a charity you can go back and go over what are people talking about in this sector. So it’s all there in one place at the click of a button, you can also, in your CV, you might be saying I’m really interested in fundraising so you could be pinning a–you could be putting up photographs of different events where you’ve been fundraising or you could be pinning details of other upcoming events to show that you’re planning on trying to keep on track of things. And then your personal stuff as well. So, if you’re really interested in interior design, or gardening, or anything, you can have a board to do with that and then you’re can be saving images there and again it just says I have an interest outside of my course which is really important because employers don’t just want to hire somebody who is really good in college, they want to hire somebody who’s got a bit more going on, a bit more experience, different interests, bringing different prospectives so it’s a way to show a good mix of your professional and your personal interests.

James: Excellent, unfortunately time is running away with us Marielle. But time for one final question before we move to the quick fire question round. Let’s ask about Facebook. So Facebook is this, should listeners be using it as a job search tool, or is it just more question of locking it down, keeping it private, and making sure there’s nothing that’s not going to get you the job that’s on your profile?

Marielle: I think the main thing is the locking it down. I’m amazed, I can’t get over how many people have huge amounts of information out there about them on Facebook. Do what you want in your personal life, and share it with your friends on Facebook but you really don’t want it out there in the public domain. So, locking it down is the first thing, it’s the most basic thing, even before you set up a LinkedIn profile, lock down your Facebook. But it can be useful in surprising ways I suppose and one is companies are increasingly investing in creating company pages on there so you could be liking companies that you want to work for and that way you’ll get updates in your news-feed about different jobs that are coming up and deadlines or different events. They’ve often showcased their company culture on Facebook so they might put up a picture of Team Day or a picture of them all doing some sort of corporate social response video or something, it’s a good way to get a sense of what they’re trying to sell about themselves. The other thing that’s really useful with Facebook is, you can actually do a search for people who work in different companies which most people don’t seem to be aware of. So, you can go into the search bar and you can say, people who work in X company. And you will then get a list of profiles of people on Facebook who work in that company, and it will tell you if you have any mutual friends, so again like LinkedIn you can then go OK I want to talk to that person, who’s a mutual friend I can ask them if they would mind contacting this person saying can this person have a chat with you, so people don’t seem to know that exists but it’s a really useful feature and there’s plenty of people on Facebook who mightn’t be on LinkedIn so it’s an extra pool of people who you could speak to. And then you know, people on Facebook are for the most part your friends, so it’s a fantastic resource when you’re looking for work. You could put out a message status update saying I’m looking for work in XYZ, does anybody know anybody working there and people will come back to you and help you if they can. Your friends are the most likely group of people who will want to help you, so why not let them know what you’re looking for and let them help you and connect you with other people if they can.

James: I think that’s a really good point for us to finish on because all of these social networks are about connections and networking, and it’s so much easier if you can utilise the connections that you’ve already got with your friends. It will be pushing on an open door and they will always help you.

Marielle: Absolutely.

James: So, Marielle, moving to our weekly staple questions now. Which one book would you recommend that our listeners should read to help their job search?

Marielle: There’s a lot of books, but I would say the one that kind of sticks out for me for students is The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman— who is one of the co-founders of LinkedIn and Ben Casnocha and it is just, it’s a very short book, but I remember reading it and finding it very, very energising and so it’s about looking at yourself as a start-up, and looking at your career as if you’re a start-up company and that really high-energy kind of way. And, they talk about this whole idea of always being learning, always trying new things out, they talk about the constant beta theory, you’re a constant work in progress and that’s a one that I’d very much subscribe to and it really encourages you to not only know what you’re good at, but also kind of go out there and create new opportunities to learn more skills, to meet new people, and again that’s one that I’d be very much behind. Take opportunities to go out there, do things that you mightn’t normally do. You never know what idea might come out of it, what conversation might come out of it, the best ideas come out of the most random conversations. So, really, they have this idea that I really like, that you should put some money aside every month out of your pay-check so even if you have a student job for example, you could keep a few coins out of that and that’s your kind of interesting people fund so you use that money to take somebody interesting out for coffee, and I think that’s a really good idea. I’m such an advocate for going out and talking to people and trying to kind of build your network and find people who can help you so, you don’t have to actually put aside money every month, but it’s that concept of constantly being alert to who can I talk to, how can I connect with them. They’re talking about taking intelligent risks and I think that’s a really important thing at college level as well. College gives you a really great sort of bubble where you can through societies and stuff and through having a bit more time, maybe, and being able to volunteer, you can try out things that are maybe a little bit scary, a little bit different, to get outside of your comfort zone but that is where you will first of all gain huge confidence and that will help you in general but also it could open up different ideas for different things that you’d love to do, but maybe thought you couldn’t. So, I just love this idea of kind of high energy approach to your career where you’re always putting yourself in the way of opportunities so I think it’s a really, it’s a very easy read, it’s very practical, it’s full of different kind of exercises and tasks that you can do. So, I would definitely recommend any student to have a read of that.

James: Reid Hoffman knows one or two things about starting companies and getting jobs so it would be a good book to read. I’ll link to that in the show notes so, check out the show notes at graduatejobpodcast.com, the links to everything that we’ve discussed.

And also, Marielle was far too modest so her new book Social Media for you Student and Graduate Job Search is brilliant so make sure you definitely add that to your book reading list.

Marielle: Thank-you.

James: And, next Marielle. What website would you recommend that our listeners should be checking out?

Marielle: You know, I was thinking about this and I thought I can’t really think of one website that I recommend because it depends on so many different factors, and I find myself the more I get into Twitter, the less I go to websites. So I really follow Twitter, people who curate different links, who share other links and I follow those and end up on probably forty different websites every week reading interesting things, so I thought instead of saying what website, I would tell you a few accounts that I find really useful, and on Twitter. So, the one person that I always just agree with absolutely, everything she says is Hannah Morgan. So, she is @careersherpa, her advice for job seekers is just 100% spot on and she shares really, really interesting content from different websites across the web so that’s a really good account. Then more on the really student side of things, Leo Woodhead, Nick Newman, David Shindler, these are all really good kind of established careers advisers who are giving really, really sound solid advice on a regular basis themselves and also sharing interesting things that they come across. It’s a good way of having quite a dynamic source of information rather than sticking to just the one website.

James: Super, and I’ll link to all of the Twitter accounts which Marielle just mentioned and David Shindler we had him on episode six, he’s a great guy.

Marielle: Yes, and John Lees, I saw you had as well, he’s very good.

James: He certainly is, and finally, Marielle. What one top tip would you give our listeners that they can implement today to make a difference in their job search?

Marielle: The top tip that I give to every job seeker is find somebody who can help you and ask them for help because you’ll be amazed at what comes back.

James: That’s a brilliant point for us to finish the interview. Marielle, what is the best way for people to get in touch with you and the work that you do?

Marielle: Well, I’m obviously on a few social media channels, so, Twitter is probably the most immediate one so I’m just @MarielleKelly, very simple and my name is a bit hard to spell which is the only issue, but they can find me pretty easily, or else, on LinkedIn. Again, it’s just Marielle Kelly on LinkedIn and I’m delighted to have a chat with anybody who would like any advice.

James: Thank you for so much for appearing on the Graduate Job Podcast.

Marielle: Thank-you.

James: My thanks again to Marielle Kelly, a slightly longer one again but with that many top tips, I didn’t want to stop the flow. Three super brief points from me, the first, is that with social media, you have to be in it to win it. Don’t’ hide your light under a bushel, get out there and get profiles set up, at the very minimum on LinkedIn and Twitter. Your job seeking rivals will be doing it, so make sure you are too. Second is, use the tips mentioned today and reach out to people at the companies and industries where you want to work. Ask people for help in the right way and you will be surprised by the response. More often than not they offer their help, and again, if you don’t ask, you wont get. And my final tip, and one we didn’t really touch upon was, remember privacy settings are there for a reason, employers will check your social media footprint, so make sure there is nothing there that will put them off. If needs be, think about having two separate Twitter accounts for example. A public job seeking one, and a private one where you can send all your celebrity big brother tweets from. You know it makes sense. So there you go, episode 38 done. My thanks to you for listening, when I see the download figures and just where around the world we have downloads from it blows my mind, and is appreciated more than you know, so many thanks for taking the time to listen. Please do check out my short couple of questions at www.graduatejobpodcast.com/survey it will be a big help! Stay tuned next week when I have former graduate recruiter turned author Matt Hearnden on the show discussing the 18 more unusual tips to help you get a graduate job. I hope you enjoyed the today, but more importantly, I hope you use it, and apply it. See you next week.


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