adding dimensionality to a cardboard cutout of a person.

[seryn]

Does anyone have any advice on which kinds of online stuff are mandatory if you're pretending to be an actual person who might be employable?

You can assume I have realname™ type email (which I do, with both Yahoo and Gmail and they're separate from where the DW people know me) but I don't belong to anything else. I could have G+ but I'm not likely to have any content there (and I didn't sign up because that made it a lot easier to make sure there were no accidents.) There's nothing I would share that wouldn't hurt me more than it would help at least in the long run.

I don't really want Facebook, but I'll sign up if it's required to be a person. I'm going to leave my content as empty as possible and make absolutely sure I only use it in a browser I never use for anything else so I won't be auto-sharing my personal business.

I know I need LinkedIn. *grimace*. Do I need Twitter?

How hard is Skype to use? My computer promises to have "free skype and video calls" and I did configure the Gchat to use video, although I've never used it. I only tried once with Corrvin who was on her way to work and not interested in flashing me.

What else am I missing? Tumblr? Pintrest?

Comments

[jenett]

Depends a bit on what you want to do with it.

I have a Facebook account, because I cannot talk about the privacy, usability, and social media aspects of using it without having one. But I do not like using it.

I have a LinkedIn, and yeah, that's useful, partly because as you develop stuff you can demonstrate, they make some things really easy to link.

An interesting reflective professionally-related (i.e. not about job stuff per se, but about learning job-related things, or related topics) blog may be more use than Twitter or Facebook, unless you're looking at jobs where social media use/awareness is a big deal. Same deal with Tumblr and Pinterest: if you are looking for jobs where they're relevant, you want one. If you're not, you don't need them.

In general, though, something that you can use to show professionally related skills + a reasonable sense of online personal decorum is handy. You don't need to do everything.

Skype is quite easy to use - you need the software, some sort of web cam (mine's built in, so that is very easy)

I will also reference my most-useful-job-hunting-resource: http://askamanager.org (Awesome blog, and her ebook was worth every penny, though a large chunk of the content is somewhere in her blog in some form, the book makes it much easier to sort through specific stages, and there's some new material, too.)

[seryn]

So, LinkedIn and something to demonstrate that I have a clue about internet appearances....

Simon has had former coworkers set up lunch things via Skype, but he's holding so hard to his old technology that I don't trust what he says is hard.... when I was buying this laptop, he actually told me I didn't need to spend the $9 it cost for the built in camera because he had this external webcam (it was about the size of a gerbil riding a gerbil-size snowblower). I just went and added the camera and fingerprint readers after I let him look at what I was ordering.

For now they don't look professionally relevant, so I appreciate hearing what things are "mandatory" to look like a real person.

[pj]

Facebook I would not sign up for towards employment. It's too easy to bitch there. I personally don't give a rat's ass who knows what about my life, religion, social liberal views, but I'm not looking for work.

LinkedIn is good and professional. If you want to do Pinterest for say knitting projects or cooking that would help with appearing 3 dimensional. And Goodreads for books. Twitter, tumble, FB, I think are unnecessary.

[seryn]

I've had so many people be offended that I didn't have facebook. I sort of assumed it was like not having a telephone (of any sort).

LinkedIn is mandatory. Really. And as much as I complain, since I did Simon's account, I'm not afraid of it. I must have done OK, he's gotten 3 jobs with what I did for him on LinkedIn.

I don't want to appear 3 dimensional online, not really. My online life and my RealName life are divergent. I'd hate to have Goodreads (did LibraryThing die?) because then I couldn't talk about things here without crossreferencing myself. I'm NEVER going to post about knitting under realname stuff. I got really irked with Ravelry people who couldn't figure that out. It's possibly linked, but it's not the top search results. Knitters tend to be really fuckwitted women. Not universally, a lot of us are smart and creative and everything including doing our own beyond algebraic math.... but for every one of us, there are a dozen women who just aren't anything like that. I don't generally like other knitters... it's not like reading science fiction books where you know the other reader can read bigger words and has some imagination and mental flexibility. There are plenty of knitters who use their craft to bludgeon other people with their personal belief system.

Cooking is never a good thing to talk about when you're looking for a career.... because only fat people talk about food and you don't hire those people if you have a choice. So I want to hide those interests for as long as possible.

It's possible my realname incarnation just isn't a three dimensional person.

[sciarra]

Not only fat people talk about food! Food is a really hot topic right now, whether you're interested in local sourcing or just cultivating a palate. From Ruth Reichel to Anthony Bourdain to Jamie Oliver to Michael Pollan. That's one of those gross generalizations you're prone to--go easy on yourself (for liking food) and don't assume that you will be judged negatively for something you actually like.

L and I talk about food all the time--and she's not heavy! My sister is also food-obsessed and she's svelte.

Otherwise, you might create a site for yourself if you want to showcase any online skills you have. But otherwise just linked in is fine. I have a number of friends who have avoided facebook like the plague. And the rest really is "social" media.

[seryn]

I know what I tend to talk about food-wise and it wouldn't help me. One of the food things I would have written, had I been sharing, is the healing power of whipped cream.

I watched Jamie Oliver's show where he tried to fix school food. I also liked his show where he went into a British school and taught the kids enough to serve a big catered event... because he came across with this surfer-dude attitude, but he was all "WTF is this?" when he saw that they'd started with something that should have gone on the plates at the end. It made me trust him more. I've been watching him, occassionally, since his early show when he walked around the neighborhood and snatched leaves off someone's shrubbery because it happened to be rosemary.

I believe in local sourcing of food. Of course, I live in California, where the majority of the country's food is grown. So it's kind of ridiculous for me not to get locally grown food. Of course I say this after having had Chilean berries tonight. There's a store I no longer buy meat from because they mix beef from 3 countries and it's packaged in a fourth. The contents of the package might have come from more than 40,000 miles total away.


And of course, instead of working on anything toward needing this stuff to get a job with, I folded clothes while watching streaming TV, then installed new phones.

ps. I really dislike Anthony Bourdain. One of my DW friends says the Rachel character on Glee is someone she wants to punch in the neck... that's how I feel about Bourdain. Can't explain it. He's just so irritating that I'd cheer on virulent food poisoning as the underdog in that contest.

[pj]

LOL @ your last line.

I talk about food and cooking. For me it is an act of love and Love to cook and feed my people. The people I talk to food about are not all of them fat, though some of them are. Healthy organic food choices are very trendy right now so I think your equating food=fat=bad for employment is off the mark. That said - professionally LinkIn works, social media is not neccessary and could be harmful to mainstream employment.

[seryn]

Maybe I don't have anything to say about food anyway. I tend to take the things I can do as given and hardly mention them. So most of what I talk about cooking-wise are the things that turned out poorly. I don't want to talk about eating out because I tend to go to the same places over and over.

I think having opinions is generally bad for getting a job. Because if you agree with everyone else and with the status quo it can go unsaid, if you don't agree, you'll be upsetting the boat. A lot of those boats deserve to be upset, but it's not going to help you get the job if one of the boats is your boss's favorite color.

[thistleingrey]

For looking like a "normal" person online? I'd say one of Twitter, Tumblr, FB, but Goodreads is optional unless one actually wants to use it. The only people I know on GR are librarians / library staff. (I do know that non-book-professional folks use it.)

[seryn]

I didn't want GoodReads because I don't read things I think would convince people I was interesting. I read bestselling genre fiction. That's like saying you're a fan of some soap opera.

FB would possibly save me money since it seems to be where all the deals are advertised now. But if it were to be useful it would require a lot of research to make sure I wasn't exposing something from an angle I couldn't see, and it would be another time sink.

Twitter is kind of useful because people who otherwise suck at having an active online presence seem to be able to manage it. Food trucks, restaurants who can't tell when they're going to be open.... and it's easier to filter... like a flash game designer whose work I really like, Bart Bonte, has a blog but it's chock full of him touting other people's games and his new stuff is too well hidden. The Twitter thing is just about his stuff.

I can't tell what the point of Tumblr is. It seems to be people reposting content without any attributions. So you see something cool and you'll never be able to figure out where it came from or anything about it because chances are the Tumbler person just posted the picture. I'd say that I'd never seen original content there, but honestly, how would I know?

If it's required to look human, I'll jump through the hoops and sign up for things. Because we know appearing human is the best I can hope for since I'm not actually human underneath.