Who's reading your email?

According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, it's getting a bit tougher--before the courts anyway--to monitor an employee's email. What I found fascinating is that 38% of companies have someone on staff whose job it is to read outgoing emails.

And that means your personal accounts, too. At least if you access them from the office:

In another case this year, Bonnie Van Alstyne, a former vice president of sales and marketing at Electronic Scriptorium Ltd., a data-management company, was in the thick of a testy legal battle in Virginia state court with the company over employment issues when it came to light that her former boss had been accessing and reading her personal AOL email account. The monitoring went on for more than a year, continuing after Ms. Van Alstyne left the company. Ms. Van Alstyne sometimes used her personal email account for business purposes, and her supervisor said he was concerned that she was sharing trade secrets.

The supervisor, Edward Leonard, had accessed her account "from home and Internet cafes, and from locales as diverse as London, Paris, and Hong Kong," according to legal filings in the case.

Ms. Van Alstyne sued Mr. Leonard and the company for accessing her email without authorization. A jury sided with her, and the case eventually settled.

Um, she left the company. Continuing to access her personal account after she is gone sounds like stalking to me. I wonder if Mr. Leonard is still with the company?

Best and Worst Metro Areas

SimplyHired has released their data on the best and worst metro areas for job postings for September 2009. The results compare the number of non-duplicate posts to number of unemployed in that area.

Use TweetDeck to update Twitter Job Searches

I'm still skeptical about using Twitter to find work, mainly because I have not met anyone personally who has found work via Twitter. But I did configure a search on TweetDeck (which I think makes plain Twitter functional) that may be helpful for those determined to prove me wrong.

Basically, TweetDeck is an app for Twitter that helps you manage your tweets. You can also run searches on Twitter, via TweetDeck and get pop-up updates if your search terms appear in Twitter. (These pop-ups are slightly annoying, but if you are Twitter-obsessed, perhaps you love their cheerful appearance.) Anyway, once you are signed in to TweetDeck or have downloaded it onto your desktop or iPhone, you can stay updated on your Twitter feed and get refreshed searches.

You can just type in your keywords/search terms, you don't need the hashtags because the search will send you posts where the search terms appeared, whether they have hashtags or. Since supplying a hashtag is voluntary on the part of the tweeters, this means you will get posts both with and without hashtags. (This, of course, can be good and bad, but if you are determined to use Twitter, you are determined to try anything.)

I would recommend running a Boolean AND, of the keyword for the profession you are looking for AND jobs, so you don't get the librarian saved my life tweets, or something about weird fantasies from people hanging out in the reference section (amazing what glasses and some smarts do to some people's libidos).

You can run several different searches, four displays nicely, but just remember that you will need to scroll sideways to view them all.

Now let's see if running searches on Twitter can actually lead to a real person, who will post a real comment that they found a real job--not just a posting or an interview, the full meal deal--through Twitter. I would prefer to hear from librarians and their successes, but I'll take anyone who can prove that Twitter got them employed.

Employers sidestep recruiters...from the Globe and Mail

WK4US has been having a discussion about how to use LinkedIn properly for finding work, and one of the members of the list posted this article from the Globe and Mail, Employers sidestep recruiters to tap social media.

The employers are using social media, but they are also exploiting the power of weak ties--finding a job through an acquaintance. They are using the "refer a friend" feature found on many online networking sites. This means that if in your circle of friends, they come across a posting that would be of interest to you and they pass it on, just as the workers in this article are posting job opportunities on their Facebook walls for their friends to read.

Chances are many of your friends have a similar background and skill set (you can read Mouw's articles about social capital for more on this topic), and employers are tapping into this via social networking. It isn't new, though the medium is making it more visible--not everyone would see the posting for employees on the church bulletin board.

The interviewed employers in the article appear to mainly come from the retail sector.

How to Find a Job on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter , MySpace and Other Social Networks

How to Find a Job on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Other Social Networks by Brad and Debra Schepp is a nice basic book on how to use online networking tools to look for work.

More than one half of the book is devoted to LinkedIn, with the other networking tools receiving one chapter each. The book is filled with testimonials from users who have used that service to find work online, and it also includes advice from users on how to navigate the site and on online networking etiquette, mainly focused on LinkedIn practices.

This book may have nothing new in it for experienced users, but for people who have not joined an online networking service, or have joined but have done nothing more than update their status, this book would offer some direction on how to proceed.

If you haven't used LinkedIn to look for work, you should know that:

• There are librarians on LinkedIn, some looking for work and some that are responsible for hiring
• There are librarian groups on LinkedIn, some offering general support and information, and others that include job boards
• There is a job posting service on LinkedIn that you can use to find work. Some of the job postings will ask that you are have recommendations and can get a referral within your network to apply to a position. Even if you have less than 50 connections, you will probably have at least one third degree connection who you may be able to get put forward by, depending on how your network works.

If you aren't on LinkedIn, you might want to add it to your job search strategy. You can also consider using LinkedIn to fuel your job club if you are currently at library school or have a local networking group for job seekers.

How to Find a Job on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and Other Social Networks will give you the basics, but you can also sign up for some online education from the LinkedIn Learning Center.

Twitter mistakes

HR Guru has an article on Twitter mistakes, and I hope you aren't making any of them, but you might want to mention them in some of your how-to-job-search classes.

I would also add that you don't add any identifying hash tags, like the name of your workplace, or where you live, should limit your exposure. Tweeting under your full name will also get you outed pretty quickly, though I could argue that searching for people and finding the correct one is not as easy as some people seem to think.

Articles like these, including the ones about not doing stupid stuff on MySpace and Facebook, or any other online service, have to do with discretion. Some people are just not discreet, or they are convinced that no one will ever know--and the lack of knowledge about social media, and the Internet in general, may give them a sense of security. The people you don't want to know about your online rants aren't going to find out about them unless

• someone in-house tattles on you--which they should, in cases of threats of violence, or indiscreet revelations of company secrets or intellectual property
• you friend/follow your boss and then say stupid stuff online
• they get a clue about the Internet. 

For librarians, you can also add, revealing personal information about clients/patrons that approach us in confidence.

Maybe discretion and conduct should be added to a professional behavior course? They are topics to be addressed, if only briefly, in a course on online job searching.

discretion

Dwindling job supply

This post from ERE.net summarizes the findings of two reports on jobs and the economic recovery in the US.

If you run a job center in your library, you might want to add the Conference Board Help Wanted OnLine Data Series, as well as the Employment Trends Index, from the same source, to your list of links.

LinkedIn API

This comes via the SimplyHired blog, a video from LinkedIn about how developers can use the LinkedIn API to create job searching tools on the web.

Liar. liar

Last week, a story ran on ABC News about companies that were providing fake references for job seekers, for a fee. HRGuru has picked up the thread and tried to interview one of the companies that would provide you with fake job details and they also provided a good analysis of whether lying on your resume was legal or not. According to an article from the Association for Business Communication, quoted in the HRGuru post, lying on your resume is not illegal--unless you are using a degree from a diploma mill on your resume and if there are laws in place in the state that you work in about falsifying information on a resume.

But why would people lie on a resume?

1. They don't have the education that the position requires. Please don't lie about being a surgeon just because the salary looks enticing. I also do want to have sympathy for people who can't get into certain fields where the position is not protected or professionalized, but the excuse that I have a family, I have a house, I can't go back to school is a false one for me. I see many people who are in that situation--family, kids, dog, even single and struggling--and they make the sacrifice to go to school. Need the education: go get it.
2. They don't feel that a previous employer, if contacted, will treat them fairly. If Kreskin retires, you should have his job. You have no idea what a person will say as a reference, unless they come out and say, I won't recommend you. In that case, there are other reasonable ways around that problem: ask a colleague to act as a reference, get some personal references, ask another supervisor. All of these will work. If you were really treated unfairly, get an advocate or a lawyer and get an appropriate written letter of recommendation that you can give to potential employers. Use the legal, appropriate options available to you, first. Don't lie.
   
   These options are open provided that you didn't screw up and deserve the bad reference. In that case, you need to do some penance, look for people who will assist you, and actually work to deserve some forgiveness.
   

And if you are actually in the position where you need the education to get to where you want to be, or you have truly screwed up and need to get right, there are many community resources available to you that will help you get back together. You can plead fear, overwork or laziness, but many other people have overcome those obstacles.

If you're a librarian teaching a resume skills class and get asked about "fudging" on a resume, be clear that it is not appropriate, and provide some local community resource referrals for career and education counseling. Especially if the obstacle is only in their minds like the poor, fired bank worker in the HRGuru article.

Who's on Twitter?

Susan Strayer, the author of The Right Job, Right Now, is keeping a list of the companies that are posting jobs to Twitter. Handy.

Stalked off

Now, I know the article [Stalk your way to a new job] was tongue-in-cheek, but I don't recommend stalking individual people at an organization--you should follow news stories and items about an organization. If the people that work there happen to publish and you might end up working in their department, you should read their publicly available work. But staking out their Facebook page?

According to the article,

Within minutes, you can find out where he’s from, how to reach him, where he’s worked in the past, and – perhaps most importantly – what his favorite movie is. The more you know about him, the better your ability to sell yourself.

Not so fast. This depends on a few factors.

1. The person is online and is accessible. This mean that they keep their blog or their Facebook profile out in the public sphere on their own name. Lots of people don't.
2. Even if you think you have the right person, how do you know that you do? Plenty of celebrities have people who name-jack them (would that be Twitter jack?) but I know quite a few people who have misspelled potential colleagues names.
3. For librarians, many of us know where the privacy settings are. And we teach others where to find them.

A far more helpful post would have been how to find out information about a company and their prospects, especially for privately-owned or small firms not listed on the 500 that Fortune slavers over each year.

Use Social Media

This is a link to an article posted on Inside Higher Ed about the benefits of using social media for PhDs. A lot of what the article says can be applied to librarians. I do think that a lot of librarians are blogging, but I don't see very many of us on LinkedIn, so pay attention to what the author has to say about the benefits of LinkedIn.

I would like to add that it is relatively easy to import a badge from LinkedIn and place it on your blog, so that if someone reads your blog and wants to find out more about you, they can find your profile on LinkedIn. Which can also lead to your resume, should they decide to find out if you are a librarian-for-hire.

You can also get a LinkedIn Companion for Firefox (which has gotten mixed reviews on the source page, but I think it can be handy). When I used it and scanned job postings, I could also see if anyone on my LinkedIn network was connected to the company. I would feel more comfortable using my first degree connections if I was looking for info on a prospective company, but you can use this tool to see who you might know, weak or strong-tied to you, at the company.