GadBall Blog | GadBlog

The GadBall team is happy to announce the first release of Career Link, a unique Facebook application that helps you cultivate your Facebook network and build it into a professional community.

You’ve invested a significant amount of time building your network of friends on Facebook. Introduce your friends to your professional experience and goals. When your friends know what you do for work they can help you by introducing you to their friends; your friends may know people who can help you do your job better.

A Career Link professional profile gives you the opportunity to describe your job and employer. You can make your Career Link profile visible to your friends, and their friends – someone you know may be searching for a job similar to what you do, or you may know of a relevant opening at your company for a friend who is looking for a new job.

Career experts estimate that the vast majority of job openings are never advertised or publicly announced, but filled through networking. Career minded people devote time to cultivating relationships, and CareerLink helps you transform your Facebook friends into professional contacts.

Not familier with Facebook? – it’s a social networking website that connects people with friends and others. Career Link adds another layer of connections to Facebook by introducing an option to connect for career networking.

To add Career Link to your Facebook account or to create your Facebook account, simply follow this link or search for Career Link in the Facebook application directory.

After adding the application to your Facebook account, you’ll be redirected to your Career Link home page. The home page shows you relevant information regarding your account:

• Invite your friends to view your Career Link profile and see who viewed it.
• Up-to-date statistics on who viewed your profile
• If your friends shared their profile with you, you’ll be notified about it here (and on your Facebook home page) and you’ll be able to view it.

It is easy to create and update your Career Link profile . You can upload a resume (or cut and paste a resume), or extract your data from your Facebook profile, and our technology will migrate your data to your Career Link profile. Or, you can manually input your data.

You can make your profile private and not searchable, which means that no one else will know that you have an active Career Link profile, or you can set your profile as “searchable” – meaning others outside of your current network can network with you.

Easily update your profile via the profile edit page. Click on the edit button next to each section you’d like to update.

Easily share your profile with your friends or with other job boards. With one click you can specify which friends are allowed to see your profile and what job boards will receive it. If you’d like your profile removed from a job board, or not allow your friends to access it anymore, simply click the remove button. It’s that easy.

Share, connect, network, and find other professionals on Career Link

If you’ve ever asked yourself this question, ask yourself a different question – how hard is it to ride a bike? The answer is simple: If you know what you’re doing, it’s easy.

So, how do I ride into the right job for me? You’re on the internet, and this information superhighway has many paths to the right job. All you need to know is what direction to go.

Before you set off on your journey, you should know something about where you’re headed. The individuals who do the hiring (let’s call them “Hiring Managers”) are people just like you and me. In most cases Hiring Managers have this hiring responsibility only for as long as it takes to fill a position, then they go back to their other work. Yet, once they’ve made a hiring decision their superiors will continue to evaluate them based on the performance of the new employee.

And so they want to find someone who will make them look good, and they want to do it quickly and efficiently so they can get back to their own jobs.

Hiring Managers have many candidate searching tools available to them; the efficiency of the internet pretty much assures it will be used in virtually every search to fill a job. If you want to get to the point where you can make an impression (the interview) you need to understand how Hiring Managers find people to interview.

There are 3 common ways Hiring Managers use the internet:
1. Post Jobs
2. Search for Resumes
3. Network (with people they know)

Of course every Hiring Manager is different, but each will use some combination of these resources. Let’s look at how each is used.

Hiring Managers who Post Jobs.
This means the Hiring Manager reviews resumes as they come to him/her. To handle the volume of resumes received most companies use technology to “rank” resumes based on the skill sets required for the position. As a result, Hiring Managers only need to review the first 30 – 50 resumes.

To give your resume a better chance of review by a person, your resume should highlight your skills. And don’t just list your skills (aka “keyword padding”) – because many of the “ranking engines” evaluate the words around the skills keywords to weight the importance of each. Highlighting your skills means you describe how each enhances your ability to perform the duties of the position. Do this by describing how you have used each of your skill sets in previous positions, or how you expect to apply each in the position for which you are applying. You should also list your proficiency with each.

Hiring Managers who Search for Resumes.
This is the same as addressing Hiring Managers who post jobs, except the specific words used by Hiring Managers when they type in their search may have synonyms. When highlighting your skills you should also include some of the more common variations of the word(s).

For example, if you are a “web developer”, you should also describe yourself in your resume as a “web site programmer” even a “website programmer” (notice the omitted space); or if you are a “truck driver”, you should also describe yourself as a “Class C Driver” or “Certified Driver”. You know your abilities best, and you know how they’ve been described by others – make sure your resume has EVERY variation of each important skill you possess.

Hiring Managers who Network.
The simple truth is this: A Hiring Manager is a person (just like you and I) who needs to fill a position, AND will be evaluated in the future based on this hiring decision.

EVERY Hiring Manager is concerned about your ability to make them look good. This is worth repeating: The individual who hires you WILL be judged by how well you do your job. As humans we make decisions based on our comfort levels. And we’re more comfortable making a decision when others approve of what we are doing.

This means – you need to let everyone you know that you are looking for a job and encourage them to tell their friends. When there are 2 or 3 potential people to hire, and one who is recommended by a friend (or a friend of a friend), the person with the recommendation is given more thought. This is basic human psychology.

Contact all of your friends, get them a copy of your resume, and ask them to let their friends know what you are looking for. And be proactive – ask your friends who they know who is doing a job similar to what you seek, and expand your network by getting in contact with those people. Your friends have friends who have friends (and so on…) who have friends who need to rid themselves of their “Hiring Helmet” and find someone they can trust to do the job right.

In another article we’ll discuss other methods of circulating your resume. With a resume highlighting your accomplishments and skills, you are on the path towards finding the right job for you.