Facebook Your Way to A Fabulous Career!

Online networking is the new-age way to maintain contact with friends, find dates and while away the hours. Now ‘Generation Facebook’ is beginning to use it as a means of finding not just a real job, but an unreal job.

So, where is the best place to park your cyberself if you want to nab the job that is tailor-made for you?

Facebook

Facebook is teeming with members who are interested in more than just throwing monkeys at each other, and would prefer to talk shop than shopping.

The drawcard of the site essentially boils down to having a link to old friends, friends of friends, ex-colleagues and a plethora of other people who could be your career’s new best friend. It’s the new way to network and could be the ‘right place at the right time’ when word starts circulating that your dream job is on the market.

The team behind Facebook are also adding a lot of career friendly applications to help you hunt, apply and get that job in the bag.

In the ‘Marketplace’ you can browse for tickets, rooms, bags, oh and your next job. Like Seek, job seekers can browse through available positions. Unlike Seek, users can chat and sell themselves – giving a whole new level of interactivity to the business of job hunting.

Another application – Jobster – can do all sorts of weird and wonderful things to get you that job. You can join the Talent Networks of your favourite companies, get job alerts based on your career interests and post your resume online.

The site is very popular with companies who can target their ads to certain demographics, and create customised Facebook pages in order to sell themselves to talented job hunters.

VERDICT: Facebook is well and truly straddling the fence between a job-hunting haven and a place that's way too casual for a serious career hunt.

LinkedIn

If you are a little further up (or completely over) the hill from the MySpace generation, or prefer to keep business and pleasure in strictly different compartments, LinkedIn is the online job-hunting haunt for you.

Unlike the other sites, LinkedIn is a dedicated business-only service and is the hangout of 24 million participants across 150 industries worldwide.

‘Friends’ on Facebook or MySpace become ‘connections’ on LinkedIn. Lists of your favourite bands, grog and movies are replaced with a serious resume, portfolio and list of achievements.

Instead of joining groups such as the ‘Mullet Appreciation Society’ or ‘You Know You Are Unemployed When … ’, LinkedIn members join alumni, industry and professional groups in order to stay in touch with old colleagues and create new ones.

Beyond word-of-mouth job hunting, companies are also beginning to actively recruit from the site. You can search for jobs online just like you would at seek.com, or you can search for jobs that have been posted by your LinkedIn network. The latter relies on solid networks and a recommendation by one of your contacts.

You can also see which of your contacts work for various companies, so you can hit up your contacts for job info and introductions into your dream business.

VERDICT: This is the new-age way for traditionalists to chase careers.