By Mark McDonald, Career Coach, Sli Nua Careers (Dublin North)

One of our career coaches represented us at the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) annual conference and exhibition in Manchester. A very obvious theme at the event was the increase in the use of social platforms within the recruitment process.

Employers and recruiters are using these platforms to source talent, reduce recruitment costs and time to hire. It’s fair to say that social media now plays an important role in the recruitment process. As a job seeker, are you doing your best in order to maximise your visibility?

The obvious platform which people know about is LinkedIn. If you don’t have a profile you should create one today. Why? Because it’s free, most of your competitors will have a profile, and it’s now the first point of reference for employers who engage with social recruitment platforms.

Your digital footprint shouldn’t stop with LinkedIn alone. There are many other platforms where you can display your potential worth to employers. Look at Twitter for example. Find out who is posting about your area of expertise and join in on the conversation. Analyse the hashtags used in these types of posts and start using them yourself.

Facebook is always a good place to let people know what your talents are. You could post information relating to your area of expertise and also connect with companies you may wish to work for in the future.

Google Plus is another option where you can connect with like-minded people and share information relating to your professional world.

Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, and many more platforms exist. These are places where you can increase your digital footprint and let people know what you know about your profession.

Have you ever thought about starting a blog? This is another excellent way to connect with people and show off your skills. You can tag your blog posts with terms relevant to your profession and people searching the web for similar information will be led to your posts.

While in Manchester our coach was given a demonstration by www.monster.co.uk of their new product offering, Talent Bin. This enables employers to search for IT professionals by entering key information relating to the type of person they need. Talent Bin will then scrape the web and look at all social media platforms in order to generate profiles of likely candidates based on the search criteria entered.

In my opinion, if an innovator as big as Monster is pioneering this new approach, the rest will soon follow. Several industry experts spoke at the conference and they all made reference to the benefits that social recruitment offers the employer.

Let’s face it, we live and work within a digital era. Maybe now is the time to think about our own digital footprint and ask the question, will my next employer find me?

Mark McDonald is a Career Coach with Sli Nua Careers and works out of Dublin North. You can read more about him, and make a booking HERE for CV Preparation and Interview Training.

More articles from his blog can be accessed HERE