Career Services: Taking Advantage of Social Networking

Entry by Pat Patterson

Social networking may help you reach your student body, keep in contact with alumni, connect students and alumni with employment opportunities, and market your events.  John Hill, alumni career services director at Michigan State University (MSU), has had a lot of success with social networking:

The MSU career services network’s social networking strategy is to have alumni help it access industries, interest areas, and professions that it wouldn’t be able to reach through traditional on-campus recruiting or career fairs.

“The MSU alumni who get involved in these groups through social and professional media are our low-hanging fruit and it’s up to us to mobilize them,” Hill says. “Social media gives us a ready-made repository to identify them.”

MSU primarily focuses on LinkedIn as there are 135,000 MSU alumni and students using it. Through information and data on resumes, the career services network creates communities that are attached to MSU. For example, there is an MSU Alumni Association group on LinkedIn. 

“If an alumnus posts that he is looking for job opportunities in Chicago and connects with [an opportunity] through the MSU Alumni Association group, the university gets credit for that without dedicating staff time to the individual request,” Hill explains.

“That’s a win-win. Staff also try to connect people to jobs. On LinkedIn, I have 2,000 first-level, 250,000 second-level, and 8.3 million third-level connections. If I can mobilize members of my network as internal referrals and have them share a job seeker’s resume with their organization or network, that’s pretty powerful.”

The MSU career services network uses Twitter to provide career development information, such as who’s hiring, effective ways to interview, what regions have jobs, and more, to followers. 

“Followers can read the information at their leisure and then act on it, giving credit back to the institution,” Hill says. “Social media is a great platform for helping people to make connections and find helpful information. By facilitating these professional connections and providing key information for our students and alumni, we are teaching them to ‘fish for themselves’ rather than being a crutch that they lean on.”  

Social media also provides information about how to market to alumni. For example, the MSU Alumni Association has 110 regional groups. Hill can search for MSU alumni in a city and identify the common interests they list on their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles around which to hold events.

Read the full article here.

Also, make sure your students maintain a professional online presence.  You can direct them to our past articles: Creating a Respectable Facebook Profile and Creating a Professional LinkedIn Profile