How to Use Pinterest in Your Job Search - Career Advice Blog for Millennials

How to Use Pinterest in Your Job Search - Career Advice Blog for Millennials Question: Apart from being household names, what do The Weather Channel, Random House Books, Southwest Airlines, General Electric and The Wall Street Journal have in common? Answer: All of them are brands that are killing it on Pinterest. Best-known for its mostly-female user base, Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing social media sites in recent years. In 2014, for example, its male users doubled â€" an impressive feat for a company thats only been around since 2010. Not surprisingly, more and more companies are using Pinterest to further their marketing efforts. That means you also have more and more opportunities to get noticed in the job market, other than through traditional job boards and LinkedIn. To make the most of this not-so-newfangled tool â€" because six years is ancient by todays standards â€" heres how to turn your Pinterest into a career maker. 1. Treat It Like a Portfolio Since Pinterest is a visual platform, its a great place to show off your creativity. If you’re in a creative field, you can spruce up your resume with a creative design, and upload one to your profile. Or you can post photos, videos, infographics and other media to wow employers with your artistic skills.         Re-pins are big on Pinterest â€" in fact, 80 percent of content has already been shared. If you want to make your pins more shareable, its best to: Use a vertical or portrait orientation. Make it at least 600 pixels wide, with 736 pixels being the optimal width. Use no more than three separate images per mosaic. Use an aspect ratio of 1:3:5 or 2:3. Edit images to include text. Include rich, descriptive alt text.   If your portfolio is made up of written pieces â€" e.g. blogs, articles, sales copy â€" Pinterest is unfortunately not the best platform for them. However, you can link to them in other ways (keep reading).   2. Use It for Research Want your dream company to find you via Pinterest? Make sure theyre active users on the site. Search their names via the bar provided or type general industry terms such as technology and online marketing to cast a wider net. Dont forget to check whether the accounts youre looking at are verified, so you know youre connecting with the real deal. While youre at it, take a closer look at those companies boards. How do they present themselves on Pinterest? Do they seem like they use the site regularly, or do they post only on occasion? This will clue you in on whether Pinterest is the best way to reach out to them and how you can revamp your brand and profile to mirror theirs.   3. Connect With Companies Once you find a good company, follow their boards and engage with them. Re-pin their posts that resonate the most with you. Leave thoughtful comments that add value to those posts. The more you do this, the more likely someone from that company will notice and reach out to you or recognize your name on a resume.   4. Be Profersonal Sure, youre an awesome professional through-and-through. But what about your persona outside of work? Remember to sprinkle your profile with your unique personality, too. Dont be afraid to pin about things like cute animals, cupcakes and home decor inspiration. Keep your posts authentic but not exhibitionist. As long as none of your pins are anything youll regret posting later, the employers who matter will like getting to know you outside of your resume. Of course, you want people to know your profile belongs to you and no one else. Upload your best headshot as your profile pic. Use it on your other social networking sites. Use your real name for your username and other relevant pins/boards.   5. Share Links to Your Other Sites If you have an official website or an account on other social networking sites, dont hesitate to share those, too. Link to them via your profile bio or use your pins descriptions to link to individual posts. To cross-post between Pinterest and Facebook, in particular, heres a handy guide to help you out.   6. Dont Make It All About You You know those people who only talk about themselves? Nobody likes being around those types, whether in the real world or the virtual one. So dont be that person. Instead: Re-pin posts by other pros in your industry. Drop them a sincere compliment via their comments section. Engage your commenters in turn, but only if theyre not being abusive, hurtful or trollish. No matter where you are, being considerate is always appreciated.   7. Find Inspiration Need more ideas on how to make your Pinterest stand out? Look up career experts on the site. Type career advice, workplace success and the like in the search bar, and pay close attention to their posts on how to use Pinterest as a marketing tool. If theyre able to gather enough traction on the site on their own, you know their career advice rings true. Also, youll want to find companies that do a great job of leveraging Pinterest, such as Mashable, Etsy and General Electric. Take a look at what they do â€" and dont do â€" and test whether their branding strategies can work for you too.   8. Promote Your Pinterest Just because your dream company isnt on Pinterest doesnt mean you should skip the site. For example, lets say you applied for a company via LinkedIn, and the job description requires you to send over a portfolio. Assuming you used Pinterest as your portfolio, you can still link to it in your cover letter/resume. You can also link to your Pinterest via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other sites you wont mind an employer seeing. Let your friends/followers/what-have-you know about your newly opened Pinterest account via an update like Hey, guys! Check out my Pinterest at pinterest.com/myawesomesite.   9. Use It Wisely Its easy to get sucked into the Pinterest black hole. With all those pretty pictures of cute cats, cute clothes and cute cakes, how can you not? People spend an average of nearly 16 minutes on the site, more even than Facebook. But if youre serious about using it as a networking tool, its better to restrict your usage to work-related stuff â€" at least while youre at the office. Once you come home and call it a day, you can scroll through all the pins you want, for as long as you want.   When it comes to job hunting, it pays to have creativity, resourcefulness and moxie. Pinterest happens to embody all three, so why not try it along with the usual job hunting methods? If this post inspired you in any way, or if theres anything else youd like to add, please comment/share. 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Tips to Create Your Own Sales Resume

Tips to Create Your Own Sales ResumeAre you having a hard time developing your own sales resume sample? You are not alone, as you probably have found it hard to develop your own sales resume. In fact, in the past few years, the number of graduates who have acquired sales management degrees is very low, and the number of business owners who are seeking a sales manager, in general, is also extremely low.However, you are going to be able to build your sales resume to a point where you can have it ready to go whenever you are required to meet your potential employer for a job interview. So what are some tips that you will need to follow when creating your own sales resume?o Create your sales resume by using a sales recruiting sheet. This sheet will help you to organize all the information that you would like to include on your sales resume. Once you have created the sales recruiting sheet, you will then want to develop each section according to the needs of your resume.o Develop each sec tion of your sales recruiting sheet according to the needs of your resume. You want to include as much information on your sales recruiting sheet as possible, but you also want to make sure that you include only the information that is pertinent to your position.o The data entry that you will be doing for your sales recruiting sheet will be crucial to the success of your sales resume. Data entry is crucial to any sales recruiting sheet because it allows you to make an entry of what you know and what you do not know.o Once you have entered your data entry, you want to make sure that you are listing your accomplishments. Make sure that you include all the different aspects of your sales career, but at the same time, ensure that you do not forget to highlight just a few aspects so that your sales resume can stand out from the rest.o When it comes to your sales resume, you need to take the time to become familiar with how to format your information in order to make it more memorable. Yo u also need to include this information on your sales recruiting sheet because it is the basis of your sales resume.

My Boss Plays Favorites With Other Coworkers

My Boss Plays Favorites With Other Coworkers Q: My manager is BFFs with someone she supervises. Is there anything I can do? I’ve been working in pretty good environment for the past two and a half years. My boss is about 10 years younger than me, married, with two teenage boys. She’s risen quickly up the ranks. She’s gracious, upbeat, and a hard worker. She’s also generally professional, with one glaring exception. Her best buddy at the office (who also reports to her) sits across from her office, and they chat loudly every morning, share all sorts of things about their lives, and then have lunch together several times a week. Meanwhile, my boss hired another woman (someone she knew outside the office) and this woman started a few months ago. She is also married, with teenage kids. Just as I thought would happen, this woman is now invited to lunch with my boss and the other woman I mentioned. Now the two of them have access to my boss in ways that I (and two of my coworkers) do not. I also see favoritism happening quite a bit already. It’s demoralizing to work in this atmosphere, and I feel most days like I’m back in junior high. I don’t want to join this clique, but I mightily resent it and resent the fact that they’re well aware several of us are excluded from their little lunch club. I should also add that they travel together for work â€" or should I say, arrange their travel so that they can go out of town together, stay in the same hotel, yada yada yada. I don’t know if there’s anything that I can say or do, but it makes want to leave my job. A: Yeah, this sucks. It’s one of the many reasons why managers need to have professional boundaries with people who report to them. They can be friendly, but not friends. Even if they handle all the other potential land mines perfectly (like impartially assessing their work, giving critical feedback when needed, and not favoring them when it comes to doling out assignments or perks), there’s still the issue of imbalanced access, as well as the way it makes other people feel. Your manager is allowing her interest in being friends with these two employees to trump her ability to be an effective manager. There’s not a lot you can do about that (although you could mention it if your manager’s manager solicits feedback on her at some point or if your manager herself solicits feedback), but I hope managers who think they can be friends with employees think about what you’re saying here. Q: I don’t want my coworker to move to the desk next to mine. What should I do? One guy I work with is friendly and helpful and I need his support for my projects. He now wants to move to a spare desk next to me and I’m wondering whether I should raise my concerns with my boss. I feel uncomfortable because he is very loud and quite needy, and he doesn’t take the hint when I say I need to concentrate on my work. Lastly, although we are both married, he contacted me to ask me out out by email and text (he had asked for my number to support me with an IT problem at home while I was on leave). I made light of it and turned him down, and he then said it was a joke. I previously turned down a social media request, saying that I keep that separate from my working life. Just writing the question makes me think it’s best to say something now if I don’t want it to happen but I’m wary that he is easily offended and if it seems like it’s my decision that his request is refused it makes my project more difficult to handle. A: Yes, talk to your boss. Say this: “Bob has mentioned he wants to move to the spare desk next to me. I don’t want him to, because I’ve already had problems with him talking to me too much when I’m working, even when I’ve told him I need to focus on something else. Additionally, he asked me out at one point, despite us both being married, and I’d prefer not to have increased contact with him beyond our work projects. Can you help me ensure that he doesn’t move to the desk next to mine?” You can also say that you’re concerned about causing tension with him if he learns you said something about his request, and ask your boss to handle it discreetly. A good boss will take care of this for you. These questions are adapted from ones that originally appeared on Ask a Manager. Some questions have been edited for length. More From Ask a Manager: How should I have handled an older married colleague’s interest in me? My coworker’s husband hangs out in our office every afternoon â€" and cuddles with her Should I apologize to another team for how my boss treated them?