Social media now plays an important role in many job hunts, and an enterprising veteran journalist used the one of the newest networks to create a unique and extremely brief resume recently.
Dawn Siff used Vine to make a short six second looping film highlighting her accomplishments right when the Twitter-owned service was just debuting. The short, lively video caught the attention of fellow social media users, but even though it resulted in some press, it didn’t result in an immediate hire. And after an arduous job hunt, she recently found employment in her chosen field with the Economist Group as a program manager.
Siff took to Tumblr, not Vine, to explain her new success, mentioning that though the Vine resume impressed her potential employers, she found her job through good old-fashioned networking.
Even still, we had to ask Siff why she originally turned to Vine. “I was just coming from a job as a radio producer and I had also done Web video hosting, so I found it as a fun challenge,” Siff explains. “I needed to tell a story, I could either tell a story in a long documentary or a tight news report.”
As for strategy, she broke it down into a few specifics: “Obviously, when you use social media in your job hunt there are a lot of very cool new job sites out there. There’s a site called Indeed that’s like an aggregator for many job sites, like Kayak, but for jobs instead of travel. There’s a site called The Muse that’s a job hunting site with little video intros. And I think there are so many ways to use social media to connect with people. I would also use it a lot in my research; when I had an interview with somebody, I would follow them on Twitter just to get an insight on what their jobs are. I’d also do the same for companies – it gives you a window into the culture of the company. Also you can go on Quora and see industry and business leaders posting on there, which shows you what people are thinking. You leave such a digital trail that when you walk into a job interview you should have all the clues online.”
While Vine worked for Siff, it might not be the path to success for other people prowling for employment. “I don’t necessarily know if Vine’s the way you’re gonna find a job. I don’t think I’m necessarily advocating that everyone goes out and does a Vine post. I don’t think that that’s where we’re headed. I did it because I was trying to stand out. I definitely think that there’s a lot of job hunting and job referring and job posting on Twitter. LinkedIn’s a very obvious one, there are a lot of cultural nuances to LinkedIn that can be hard to master and people have different ideas about how to use it so you should tread carefully. The conventions for it are less agreed upon, whereas I think there’s more of an established Twitter etiquette. You can’t really unfriend people on LinkedIn. I also always use LinkedIn to find background for people and on companies.”
So will she use Vine for job hunting again? “I think it’s a great platform, and I think it could be useful in a business sense – I’ve seen some brands do something interesting things with it. I’d say maybe. But I already kind of did it as a challenge.” The resume that started it all:
