A personal profile: why is it important for people in digital age?

Once upon a time, a young guy went to the castle and kneed down before his king. He said, my King, I would like to be your guard. The King then said, let a fight decide who wins. There then was a fight between the young man and the King's guard. The young man was not killed and he became the King's guard.

Half century ago, a young man graduated from university and wrote his CV and posted his CV to the company he wanted to work for. One week later, he received a letter from the company asking him to go to an interview. He passed the interview and got the job.

In 2012, a young man was going to graduate in the summer. He has got quite a few social networking sites' accounts and he uploaded his CV to LinkedIn. He has written a blog for three years since his fresher's year. He kept blogging about his study, his views, his work at uni and his part-time job. He received a message on LinkedIn from a company and arranged a Skype interview. He was hired straight after the interview for his efforts and innovative ideas in creating.

In this digital age, it is crucial for students to have their personal digital profile that could help them sell to potential employers. 

Top websites you can use to create your personal digital profile:

No.1 LinkedIn

http://uk.linkedin.com/

LinkedIn now has 175+ million users. It is a great place for HRs to look for talents and for talents to look out for great employers. There is an article on Forbes commenting LinkedIn as an indispensable recruiting platform. Here are the top 20 in-demand employers on LinkedIn according to LinkedIn Talent Brand Index.

Original post accessible here at http://blog.linkedin.com/2012/10/11/indemand-employers-2012/

As they are recruiting talents out there on LinkedIn, missing that would not be wise, isn't it?

No.2 Facebook

Facebook Facebook, there is really no need to post the web address of Facebook here right? Facebook is a less professional recruiting SNS compared with LinkedIn. However, quite a lot of companies are observing people they would like to recruit on Facebook. It becomes important then what those people put on Facebook. Employers won't care what you have for breakfast and where you go on vacation, but some content is really not recommended to be put up on Facebook if you know that your potential employers may observe you on Facebook. Exposure is a word that sometimes make people panic. My suggestion? Don't put naked photo there at least. :)

There is a very good and simple infographic on 'How to recruit with Facebook' here at http://mashable.com/2012/02/05/facebook-recruiting-infographic/. 

No.3 Twitter

Twitter has been gradually used for recruitment as well. There are quite a lot of recruitment twitter account for specific enterprises. HireRabbit posted an article about successful examples of how companies use Twitter to recruit people. The original post is available here http://blog.hirerabbit.com/how-disney-and-5-other-top-employers-use-twitter-to-recruit/. 

The online talent market has become the new talent market. Potential employees are there, employers are there. Where are you?

Virtual is the new physical

The Internet is finally bringing us together as human beings and the network is finally liberating us. We lived in farms and then we lived in cities and now we are living on the Internet. What do you feel when hearing these? Happy? Sympathetic? Or maybe horrified? I felt a mixture a feelings, happy, excited but also horrified at the same time.

Sitting in Creative Digifest now and drafting this blog post, I am not sure whether going back onto Facebook is a right decision or not. Born in 1986, I am one of the digitised generation. At least, that is what I believe I am. Still, having accounts in more than 10 social networking websites and web applications, I have already gone through the stage of being obsessed with all fancy SNS apps. It took me about 5 months to understand what I was doing there, for example, posting pictures of my breakfast, my dress and my friends randomly just didn't make any sense. Why I felt that I needed to do that? There have been quite a lot of research on people's motivations in creating digital content online. One of the most important reasons is confirmation of identity. Put simple, who we are and how we are recognised by others. What people do online defines who they are to some degree to others who observe their digital activities online. What people want others to think of them drives people's digital activities. A very simple example: less people would put on a photo featuring themselves very ugly unless they would like to do it in purpose. The thought that 'I am good in this dress' simply would drive their activity in posting a photo featuring them in the dress. Here comes the question: what's the impact of digital activity? I would say none if random activities of online citizens define digital activity. It would mean quite a lot, especially for businesses and individual who know what they are doing.

There have been quite a lot of businesses observe their employees and candidates online. Businesses that market their products and manager customer relationships online. Individuals who build their own businesses online. Digital activities are changing the world rapidly into something different yet similar to some degree to the old fashioned physical world. Personally, I believe the digital world is more useful for businesses and enterprises and of course individuals who are building their digital profile and conduct commercial activities online. For average people, they might get bored sooner or later as I did and get themselves detached from the SNS. There is a Dr. from Warwick University doing research on this issue.

Now, I couldn't help wonder what's the next phase of digital activities and how digital activities could help the commercial world. Digital Economy...