'You Are Your Brand:' Using Social Media to Find a Job

Today we share some ideas for job hunters about presenting yourself online.

Ben Kirshner is chief executive of a New York company he started in two thousand four. Elite SEM, or search engine marketing, has about twenty-five employees. Many companies use headhunters -- recruiting services that find workers for high-paying positions. But Mr. Kirshner says that can be costly.

BEN KIRSHNER: "Probably, for a one-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year employee it would cost me in the range of ten to fifteen thousand dollars."

He saves money by advertising jobs online and using social media. Sometimes finding the right person this way can take time. But recently Mr. Kirshner posted a job on the advertising site Craigslist. He says he had one hundred fifty good candidates within four hours.

He says his company does not use sites that offer to search the Web for information about job candidates. His company does that itself. Social networks and other websites can provide a lot of details about people's lives. As Ben Kirshner points out, that may even include personal information that employment laws prevent employers from asking.

BEN KIRSHNER: "Things we are not legally allowed to ask in an interview, we can find because they're publicly displaying it on the social networks."

Leslie Stevenson directs the Career Development Center at the University of Richmond in Virginia. For young job-seekers, she says, the barrier between public and private is changing.