In response to a post I read this morning by Frank Angelone, I would have to agree with his assessment on posting photos on Facebook, or any social media site for that matter, especially if you are currently in career transition, and seeking employment, or currently working and looking to change jobs.

Its really important,  not just with photographs, but almost any online content, you should think before you post, who may see it, and how they may view it, especially if it is a prospective employer.

Keep it private if you need to.  I wrote a post on my blog and made password protected, and shared with few people who I trusted, and have since made it private.  It was an issue I had with copyright infringement that at the time was appropriate, but since I’ve been blogging for a while, I’ve learned to lighten up a bit and not take that issue as serious as I had.

I have chosen at this time to keep my Facebook profile public, I do have a Myspace page, but haven’t updated it in over a year, and don’t intend on doing so at this time, it is set to private so that only my friends can see it.  Nothing to worry about there, just that I’ve chosen not to update or use myspace at this time, and made it private.

Two things I’ve done actually are matching up my online profiles across the sites with the same picture, for brand recognition mainly, so people know it’s me and what I’ve written.  Secondly, when I change the photo one one site, I chage it across the board, even on sites that I would consider more social than professional.

I do have links to various social networking sites on my contact page. I do have a Youtube channel, I do have Picasa, and other photo sharing accounts which can be shared on different social media networks, but I have not and will not post inappropriate photos or videos of myself or others because on some sites such as Facebook you can Tag a photo with another users name, and it will be attached to their account, and can be looked up as well.

In my job search and in person networking, even meeting someone for the first time, I generally dress up than down, unless it’s stated prior to the meeting that it is casual.

Coming from a background in IT, the places I’ve worked in recent past have been business casual, allowing for polo shirts instead of dress shirts, and at times jeans instead of slacks.

I had an assignment through a staffing firm recently, and asked the recruiter about how I should dress for the assignment, and was asked to wear slacks, but when I showed up, almost everyone else was wearing jeans, I felt a bit out of place, but it was ok.

I had asked about dress code prior to the assignment, and done the work that was asked of me. I talked with one of the recruiters yesterday when I went to pick up my paycheck, asking him if there was any feedback from the client on the work performed, he said there were no issues, the work was performed quickly and correctly, and his comment was ‘no news is good news’.  I hope to work again for that client, because it was an enjoyable work experience, and I learned a few things in the process I hadn’t done before.

Another good idea is to google yourself, or set up a google alert, which I wrote about here,  because it can give you an idea of what employers can find about you online.

Happy Friday and Happy reading!

-Martin

Back on January 23rd I was on twitter.com and at that time I’d been on the site for about 2 weeks so it was still very new to me, when I saw a message pop on my screen from @Tall_Geek that stated:  “Ok try to break this server….www.jobshouts.com”

Me being the techy that I am and taking him up on the challenge, I dug in and banged at the site for a bit, doing test job posts, clicking on things and seeing if I could really ‘break it’.

One thing I noticed right off the bat, that appeared like a thorn in my side from an aesthetics standpoint and which would have been a very simple and easy code change to fix was the title window for the site showed ‘this is the homepage title‘ (and I wish I had a screen shot of it now!).

I sent a message to Mike saying basically, “It’s broke.” He sent one back saying, “thanks for breaking it.” So during that first 20 or so minutes ‘tweeting’ back and forth on twitter.com over the issues on jobshouts.com, our relationship had been born.

After about an hour going back and forth that first night, I got one of the nicest compliments I’d gotten from anyone in a long time, Mike said “Ohh and thanks for all the help, I got more out of you than any other beta tester I have used in recent memory.”

Mike has a nice little writeup about how jobshouts.com came to be  posted here and I recommend reading his story.

After the initial release to Beta, Mike asked for others to join in on using the site, so I started telling people about it both online and offline.  I continued to watch the site, check things out and on occasion I’d notice something wrong, if a tweet from @jobshouts didn’t look right, or when I went to the site and noticed something odd. I would tell Mike about it. I also made a suggestion that the tweet from @jobshouts should include city and/or state  as it would let people following @jobshouts on twitter focus on or filter by that to find jobs posted local to them, and that has since been implimented.

I sent messages to two other job related organizations in my local area,  the Scottsdale Job Network, and St Patricks Employment Ministry, and when my messages were posted to their respective yahoo groups, I got responses from some people including a recruiter asking me questions, which I’d then in turn ask Mike, as one of the recruiters asked me “Are these just for local jobs?” The reply I got back through Robin one morning was in essence, “it’s global.” and that was and is their vision on this project.

I really like his tenacity and his passion in how he’s worked on this and wanting to keep it completely free for both job posters, and job seekers.

That same day that Robin told me it was Global,  there was one instance where Mike asked me to test the apply for job functionality and I found a problem that in my eyes would be a setback for some job seekers when trying to apply for a job, I use ‘filtered’ email addresses on gmail, so when I tried to use an email address like “myemailaddress+jobsearch@gmail.com” it gave an error but didn’t really tell me where the error was exactly.

I had to figure it out hmmm.. checked the file format for the resume I was sending (and I sent my real resume, not a dummy file), that was ok, checked other things on the apply for page, and they were ok too, so last thing I checked was the email address and thought ‘lets drop the +jobsearch from the email address and see what happens’, and it went through.

Since this was a problem that I couldn’t exactly spell out very easily in 140 characters on twitter and since he was asking me to test it right then, I figured there was a time sensitive issue, so I send him a message on Twitter saying something like ‘call me, got an issue with the apply function.’ and left my phone number. About two minutes later he called, we discussed, and he said it would be something corrected in a later release. It was the first time we’d talked on the phone since we met on twitter about a week earlier.

The power of the search engine on twitter was used to find a lot of the links, so kudos to twitter.com for that, and in that regard a disussion I’d seen floating around the net on various blogs with this being one example:

Does Real-Time Search Make Twitter a Google Killer? Its Fanbots Think So (BoomTown Not Quite Yet).

By the way, along with another site JobAngels, the jobshouts.com site and both Mike and Robin were mentioned in the LA Times today - ‘With JobAngels and JobShouts, Twitter helps jobless find work’ By David Sarno

As you read this post, please click on the links, they are very relevant to the story and a timeline of how I came to know this great guy named Mike Quale, and Robin and their venture together with their site jobshouts.com.

Happy reading! Martin

I have Google alerts set to email me when something comes up with ‘martinpiraino’ without the space, pretty cool to see where your information is being seen/used, and since my twitter name is my first and last name like that, it’s come up quite often lately.

I also have an alert for “Martin Piraino” and a couple of other variations, and get at least one or two emails a day lately.

I found myself quoted on another blog – regarding a tweet I answered about avatars on Twitter, should it be a picture or logo? My take on it was to have picture unless it is a company, then logo is ok.

The post in it’s entirety is located here:  Twitter Avatars – Photo vs. Logo

Pretty interesting to have my opinion counted in this and to find it on Google.

My little piece of it is noted below:

MartinPiraino I prefer to see a picture not a logo, unless it is a business, then logo is ok.