It was once thought of as a suicide mission to use an online resume for anything other than a strictly creative profession. Conventional wisdom held that boomer recruiters would find the practice distasteful and discriminate against job seekers who chose to utilize such “extreme” measures. In such a turbulent macroeconomic environment, though, this trend seems to be changing. However, the reason for this shift is typically not that recruiters have become more open minded.
Since the recession began in 2008, those in the most tenuous of positions were people slightly over or under 50, due in large part to the simultaneous collapse of their 401(k)s, the unwillingness of hiring managers to consider candidates of that age, and the inability of companies to match advanced compensation demands. Now that those job seekers are entering the market, many of them for the first time after having been “lifers” at their previous employers, they are preparing for the search in ways no one expected. The result? The 45-54 demographic group is the most steadily increasing across social networking sites; use of online resumes, resume builders, and overall resume writing services have increased exponentially; and an entire group once thought too technologically inept has moved in to compete with entry-level associates on their own turf (and even some turf that the latter group hasn’t fully explored yet, such as LinkedIn).
This seismic shift has contributed to the job woes for the Class of 2010, as job seekers on the brink of retirement are able to fully dedicate themselves to using social media to the fullest extent, all the while willing to settle for the same entry-level positions once reserved for fresh college graduates. This example illustrates perfectly the adjustments that must be made by the Web 2.0 generation in using social media. Job seekers in older demographics have never seen Facebook or Twitter as anything more than a recruitment tool, or at the very least they are able to differentiate the personal-social and job-social aspects of the respective services. Gen-Y job seekers, meanwhile, have seemingly adopted the “work to live” mentality, and with that comes the unwillingness to combine their work and personal lives (this group, obviously, has viewed social media as part of their personal lives since inception).
So what can the Web 2.0 generation do to combat the largest age discrepancy vying for entry-level jobs in decades? The answer, it turns out, is relatively simple: their undergraduate portfolios are, or should be, full to bursting by this point. The next logical step is to create an online resume that can effectively showcase a body of work without bombarding potential hiring firms. Coupled with an aggressive outreach strategy involving professors, former classmates now in the workforce, and even family members, graduates can develop a network equal to or even surpassing anything their competition can muster. Can the Web 2.0 generation use social media for job hunting? Absolutely…they just have to rethink.
