Author: Alexandra Samuel

Now that LinkedIn has become the standard place to present your professional history and credentials — not to mention the fastest way to check somebody else’s — the humble résumé has lost its once-hallowed position as the canonical version of your professional identity. Your LinkedIn profile should be the most-viewed and most current version of your professional life. That has many people asking: Do I even need an old-fashioned résumé anymore?

The answer is a highly qualified “yes”.

The Value of LinkedIn

In the past, résumés have served several functions:

1. Applying for a job: When you’re applying for an advertised position, you almost certainly need to submit a résumé as part of the application process.
2. Job hunting: Even if you’re not applying for a specific job, you may still use a résumé as part of your search process, as a way of introducing yourself to people who may be interested in your skills.
3. Professional credentialing: Résumés act as a way of establishing your professional credentials in many circumstances, like grant applications, requests for proposals, and conference or speaker submissions.
4. Professional memory: Your résumé is your own professional memory. Keeping it up-to-date is a way of ensuring you don’t forget the professional accomplishments or qualifications you may want to highlight during your next job hunt.

In the world of LinkedIn, blogs, and professional landing pages (a.k.a. “nameplate” sites), however, most of these functions can be better accomplished through your online presence. If you are job hunting, send people to your LinkedIn page instead of sending a PDF of your résumé. (Unlike a résumé, a solid LinkedIn profile includes not only your self-proclaimed qualifications, but testimonials from colleagues, clients, and employers.) If you need to establish your professional credentials, sending someone a link to your LinkedIn page will often be the most efficient way to convey your relevant experience. And for maintaining a professional memory, LinkedIn is unbeatable, precisely because it’s easy to update, and because you’re likely visiting the site on a regular basis.

To serve any of these purposes, however, your LinkedIn presence must be well-crafted and up-to-date. Even if you aren’t sending people to your LinkedIn page, it is likely to be one of the first results for anyone who Googles you to find out about your professional qualifications and experience. That’s why you need to ensure it’s accurate, compelling, and current; unless you’re updating your LinkedIn profile monthly or at least quarterly, you’re not putting your best foot forward. Setting up a memorable short URL for your LinkedIn profile, and including that URL in your email signature line, is a good way to remind yourself that this is something people are going to look at regularly.

Blogs, Websites, and Landing Pages

For all its merit, LinkedIn has limitations: you have to fit your career story into its structure, and you have only minimal control over formatting. That’s why many professionals use their own blog, personal website, or professional landing page to craft a more strategic online presence. For many professionals, the best bet is to maintain several presences, customized to different purposes, so that you can point people to the presence that is relevant to each specific scenario. For example, you might maintain:

• A speaking profile: Professionals who do a lot of speaking or conference submissions would do well to create a specialized presence on a speaker directory like ExpertFile (formerly Speakerfile), a nameplate site like about.me, or even on Slideshare.
• A services profile: If you offer services as a independent contractor, whether that’s as a web developer, a designer, a coach or an accountant, setting up a landing page for your contract work can be an efficient place to point potential clients.
• An author profile: If you have a book, blog, or publication file, you will want to profile yourself for readers or future writing assignments with an author page on Amazon, a writing marketplace like MediaBistro, or a web presence for your book.

Why You Still Need a Resume

When you are actually applying for a job, however, neither LinkedIn nor a professional landing page can replace the résumé. A strong résumé is still the gateway to an interview, and with more and more employers relying on Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) — software that screens résumés to determine which applications warrant human review — you need a résumé that you can upload to those systems. Nor can it be the same résumé for every application; since an ATS typically screens for specific qualifications and keywords, you need to customize your résumé for each job (or type of job) that you apply for, and optimize it for ATS screenings.

Even when you are reduced to creating a résumé that is an old-fashioned printable document, LinkedIn can still make your life easier. LinkedIn offers a free résumé builder that converts your profile into a draft résumé which you can format, tweak, and even download as a PDF. Don’t rely on the résumé builder to do the work of résumé creation on its own, however. When I compared LinkedIn’s automatically-generated résumé with the latest version I authored myself, the handcrafted version got an A+ from the résumé evaluation service RezScore, while the LinkedIn version only got a B-. And that was after I gave up on the PDF, and turned it into a more scannable Word document that I then cleaned up.

While it can’t eliminate the job of editing and formatting your résumé for specific job searches, LinkedIn and its résumé builder can and should change the way you think about and maintain that résumé. The standard wisdom — treat your résumé as a living document that you update anytime you have a new accomplishment to record — now applies to LinkedIn, not to your résumé itself.

Keep your LinkedIn profile up-to-date, along with any professional landing pages or blogs you choose to maintain, and most of the purposes of your résumé will be well-supported. And at the moment that you’re actually applying for a job and need an old-fashioned résumé, LinkedIn’s résumé builder will give you a strong head start.

With so many people drinking from the Twitter fire hose, it’s no wonder that some people have suggested that it can replace the soon-to-be defunct Google Reader. But that vision is based on the mistaken idea that Twitter, at its heart, is a news medium.

I believe there’s a better way to use Twitter: as a relationship medium, one that helps you find, connect, and converse with people. Being the first with a nugget of industry gossip is nice, but creating, nourishing and sustaining meaningful working relationships is far more fundamental to your professional success and career development.

And with thoughtful use, Twitter can help support those relationships. Instead of the self-organized sphere of Google Reader, you can use Twitter as a system where others do the filtering for you: a network you’ve assembled that is telling you to “check this out,” or better yet, “read this, and here’s why it matters to you.”

As I describe in Work Smarter with Twitter and HootSuite, published today by Harvard Business Review Press, the key to making effective, satisfying use of Twitter is to keep your attention focused on the people who matter most to you. You do that by using Twitter lists to organize your tweets, giving each list a name that prompts you to think about how you want to relate to each set of people you follow. A multi-column Twitter client like HootSuite (one of the world’s most popular Twitter clients) can help you focus on your lists rather than your home feed, so you’re much less likely to get overwhelmed. (Full disclosure: My employer, Vision Critical, built a survey app that plugs into HootSuite.)

Ironically, the book’s prescription for using Twitter and HootSuite also calls for using Google Reader to keep your own Twitter feed populated with news and links that will be useful to the people you care about; the book went to (digital) press before Google made its announcement. While much of the value of Reader can’t be replicated by the Twitter/HootSuite combo, when it comes to keeping your own Twitter presence lively, the combination of Twitter lists and a multi-column Twitter app can do the job.

Here’s how to set up HootSuite so that you can use it to find share-able news:

Organize the people you follow into Twitter lists; you don’t have to put everyone into a list, just the people you most want to attend to. Name each list in a way that reminds you of what you want from each set of people and relationships: “Learn,” “Collaborate,” “Laugh,” “Inspire,” and so forth.

Create a “Lists” tab in HootSuite. Set up each of the lists you’ve just created in a separate HootSuite column. If set up well, you’ll use this tab to focus your attention on the relationships that matter, instead of getting lost in your home feed.

Create a dedicated “News” tab in HootSuite. Add people to it that you want to learn from or be informed by. Then set up search and keyword columns (“streams”, in HootSpeak) to track news and links in your field. For example, the #MRX hashtag is used by people who tweet about market research, so I have a HootSuite column setup that includes any tweet with the keyword #MRX. I also have a column set up to track news about information overload, powered by the search string “overload (digital OR email OR information OR “social media”).”

Subscribe to RSS feeds from within HootSuite. While HootSuite has a built-in RSS feed tool, it’s designed for people who want to automatically tweet out their own blog posts. If you want to use HootSuite to subscribe to RSS feeds from other people, you’re better off using the RSS app, available for free from the HootSuite App Directory. Use it to subscribe to the RSS feeds of Google News and Google blog searches, constructing your search queries so they reflect the specific topic or niche you want to cover in your own Twitter feed.

Filter your “News” streams to show only links. The lists and keywords searches you’ve set up in your News tab will likely include a lot of tweets that don’t link to share-able news items. To narrow those feeds down so that they only show you link-bearing tweets, use the “filter by” option in HootSuite (in the top-right of each column, under the down-pointing arrow) and enter a slash (“/”); it will filter the column so it only shows you tweets that include the slash that is part of virtually any shared link. Now your column will consist almost entirely of links.

Share valuable links by posting them on Twitter yourself. If you’re planning to tweet or share a link that came to you through someone else’s Twitter feed, it’s polite to acknowledge the source of the link. If you’re using their tweet verbatim, acknowledge it as a retweet (beginning with RT @theirusernameI); if you’re writing your own tweet to share a link you discovered through someone else, thank them by finishing your tweet with HT @theirusername [as in “hat tip”] or via @theirusername.

Even if you’re not ready to make the leap to HootSuite, or set up custom columns, setting up a few Twitter lists can help you focus your online interaction on the people who matter most to you professionally, and focus your attention on the links they recommend. (You can also follow lists other people have curated by searching for lists on listatlas.com. It’s the best replacement I’ve found for Listorious, which also closed since I submitted my manuscript!) Beyond HootSuite’s own mobile apps, a tablet-oriented news reading app can give you a magazine-like way to read the news shared by your Twitter friends; in the case of the popular Flipboard app, you can even browse the latest news from specific Twitter lists.

None of these workarounds have dried my tears over the impending death of Google Reader, but they have shown me a silver lining. Every time a beloved web service closes, it gives us the opportunity to rethink the way we work and to reallocate our attention to what really matters. And if the term “social web” is to mean anything, what matters will always be not the information itself, but the people behind it.

Few professionals were sitting at their desks in 2004, eyeing the empty slots in their calendars and wishing that somebody would just invent a new way of communicating to fill those long and lonely minutes. People’s calendars were already full.

Social media demanded attention. It had to be put into the rotation, but that doesn’t mean we took something else off our calendars to accommodate it. Instead we just added it to the marketing teams’ tasks, challenging them to figure it out until they could make a business case for hiring full-time social media staffers.

Flash forward a decade, and any organization with serious social media ambitions has those full-time staffers. They’ve expanded teams and reassigned resources by eliminating now-deprecated communications channels. (Paper newsletter, anyone?)

For individuals however, it’s harder to expand and reassign resources. What are the rest of us taking off our plates to make room for the time we spend on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook? Not much.

If social media is worth doing, than it’s worth making time for. Anyone who’s spending more than an hour a week on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook has presumably made at least a subconscious calculation of the benefits of participating (or better still, an explicit set of goals for what they expect to accomplish with the time invested in social media usage).

But all too many of us decide that social media is worth doing without deciding what is worth giving up for it. And unless you’re one of the miraculous few who does have plenty of empty space on your dance card, you must give something up in order to make time for social networking.

How do you decide what to eliminate? You can prioritize what to keep and what to retire by answering these questions:

What am I learning from social media? If you use social media as a news gathering, training or learning resource, ask which of your prior news tracking or learning activities can be retired. If you’re now reading 10 blog posts a week on professional best practices, maybe you don’t need to attend that annual training workshop anymore.

Who am I meeting through social media? One of the great rewards of Twitter, LinkedIn and other professionally rich networks is the discovery of new colleagues or the deepening of professional conversations and ties. If you’re consistently expanding your professional network through the time you spend online, consider scaling back the number of face-to-face networking events you attend in order to build out your rolodex (and why don’t you retire the rolodex while you’re at it).

Who am I reaching through social media? Blogs, Slideshare, YouTube videos: social media provides an extensive array of opportunities for sharing your ideas and building your reputation. That may allow you to reduce the other kinds of reputation-builders that formerly filled your schedule. You may still get value from presenting to an audience of a thousand, but are you better off speaking pro bono to a room of 25 people, or writing a blog post that will be read by 250?

How am I replenished by social media? If you’ve made time for social media, it’s probably because you actually enjoy it. So tune into the emotional impact of the time you spend on Facebook or Twitter, as compared to the other kinds of activities or interactions that formerly filled up your leisure hours. What’s more relaxing: watching TV or catching up on Facebook news? What’s more fun: going to a bar, or kibitzing on Twitter? What’s more restorative: reading a blog post or reading a novel? Depending on your personal preferences, you may decide to shelve some of your less-satisfying hobbies in favor of some of your new social media activities.

One virtue of this kind of evaluation is that it not only allows you to evaluate which pre-Facebook activities are less valuable than social media, but also to notice where social media has crowded out professional or personal activities that offer more rewards than you get from spending that same hour on Twitter or LinkedIn. The key is to make these trade-offs conscious and explicit, rather than letting social media take over more rewarding activities, or letting it crowd out the remaining space in your life.

Because you are giving something up to make time for social media, even if what you’re giving up is sleep or (rarer still) empty space. Indeed, that empty space may be what’s most precious, because it’s the margin that ensures that when the next must-do activity appears on the horizon, you don’t go ten years without noticing you need to take something else off your plate.

We’ve just seen two spectacular stories of how employee dismissals can go dramatically awry in the era of social media.

First, Applebee’s waitress Chelsea Welch was fired for posting a photo on Reddit that showed a customer receipt inscribed with a anti-tipping (but pro-religion) message: “I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?” Between the original Reddit post, Welch’s subsequent article for The Guardian, and a flurry of on- and offline coverage, Applebee’s found itself at the center of a firestorm that gave everyone from labor organizers to social media evangelists something to fret about.

The very next day, we were treated to a first-person account of a mass HMV layoff, as the company’s Online Marketing and Social Media Planner live tweeted her own firing… from the company’s own Twitter account. While it only took 20 minutes for a senior manager to realize what was happening and shut off the tweets, that was long enough to garner HMV global headlines for its lack of foresight.

While one might reasonably debate who was at fault in each of these cases, it’s hard to argue that either situation was good news for the employer. Not only did the companies face tough questions about their termination decisions; they were called out for creating a “a mini-PR disaster” (in the case of HMV) and a “PR nightmare” in the case of Applebee’s.

Welcome to the challenges of HR in the social media age. It’s no longer enough to pile your freshly-dismissed employees’ belongings into a banker’s box and march them out of the building; you’d have to banish their phones and jam their Wi-Fi access if you want to guarantee that their stories will stay offline.

Since that’s neither a viable nor desirable solution, it’s time to face up to the new reality: by potentially exposing any dismissal to public scrutiny, social media makes your customers and the public into de facto stakeholders in your internal HR policies and processes.

That means that companies need to consider both their HR policies and their social media policies in light of the very real possibility that any termination or workplace dispute may become very public very fast. This is doubly true in the case of any dismissal that’s occasioned by a social media misstep, or that involves an employee with a significant social media presence.

But there’s no changing a hard truth about business: sometimes, you have to let people go. Here are five ways you can social-proof your company against backlash from dismissals or disputes:

1. Even if you have a large team working on your social media presence, consolidate management of your social media accounts so that as few people as possible hold the password for your public presences. Use a social media management tool that provides gated access to your social media accounts, so that you can cut off any one employee’s access to all your social accounts by severing their access to your system. Make sure that any social media account passwords are held by at least two people (and recorded in a secure company database), and that they are tied to a corporate (rather than personal or independent) email account, so that in a worst-case scenario, your IT department can get access to all passwords.

2. Set explicit policies for which kinds of online violations are grounds for termination, and be sure that your employees are actually acquainted with these policies. Do note that the legal and regulatory landscape around corporate social media policies is evolving fast, so you will need to consider not only what kinds of policies you’d like, but which policies are likely to be upheld if you face legal action. Just as important, consider which policies might be deemed reasonable by your customers or the general public, in the event that a dismissal became an online cause célèbre.

3. Treat the dismissal of any employee with a significant social media following the way you would treat the dismissal of a senior executive: as an internal matter for which you need an external communications plan. No, you don’t need to convene the board or draft a 12-point game plan every time you lay off an employee with more than 25 Twitter followers. But you should have a generic communications plan that you have on standby in case any layoff gets social media coverage, as well as a protocol for identifying, escalating and addressing any HR story that gathers momentum online.

4. Make sure your social media monitoring covers HR keywords. Particularly if you have a band with a higher volume of social media mentions than you can completely review, set up and monitor searches on your company name plus keywords like “hired”, “fired”, “interviewed,” or “layoff”. Tracking these mentions constantly and thoroughly will not only ensure you notice when a departing employee turns into an issue; it can help you identify those would-be employees who post ill-advised tweets on their way out of the interview.

5. Manage your GlassDoor reputation as carefully as your Yelp profile. Lots of companies put a lot of attention into their customer-facing social media presences, but pay little or not attention to employee- or recruit-facing sites. But reviews on GlassDoor, which claims to offer a peek inside companies’ walls and compensation, can influence would-be applicants and even third party observers. Keep an eye on what your current and past employees say about you on these sites, not only as an early warning system for your PR team, but as an even more crucial source of intelligence on employee satisfaction.

There’s no set of policies or practices that make employee dismissals into happy occasions. But with the right protocols in place, you can avoid being the next HMV or Applebee’s. That means not only averting PR disasters, but helping employees make smart choices about using social media so that they can stay on the team — and by becoming the kind of tuned-in, engaged employer they want to keep working for.

My last blog post argued that colleagues who come to a meeting with a paper notebook instead of a digital device are wasting their own time and that of their colleagues. That argument met with a small uproar here and on Twitter, where many readers were outraged by the idea of prescribing or proscribing a particular approach to note-taking, even if there were also those who welcomed my assault on paper.

“Why not consider the fact that people process information differently and have respect for the fact that not everyone operates in a single fashion?” asked one not-atypical comment. As Becki True put it, “[l]et’s judge people’s effectiveness on their results, and not on their methods.” Or as Scott Berkun wrote on his own blog, “[i]t’s only after I see what people produce that I’d consider commentary on the means they used.”

Yet in meeting rooms, committees and workshops across the U.S. and around the world, people have their working styles dictated all the time. Not by colleagues who would prod them into the brave new world of digital notebooks, but by managers and meeting chairs who forbid them from using their core work tools: laptops, smartphones, tablets and even specific kinds of applications (like social media tools)

If we’re outraged at the idea of stigmatizing paper, shouldn’t we be at least as outraged by rules like these? After all, the tech-banners aren’t simply asking us to bring paper in addition to our digital tools; they’re trying to keep laptops, smartphones and tablets out of the meeting room altogether. In an effort to patrol technology use in meetings, classes and conferences, we get recommendations and policies like:

• “Collect all smartphones and laptops in a box“.
• “Walk around during the session and stand near any violators” [of the no-PDA rule].
• “If you bring your laptop to class, then you are required to upload your notes to the course dropbox (or email them to me if the dropbox is unavailable) — immediately after class. Failure to do so will result in an absence.”

And these documented anti-tech policies are just the tip of the iceberg. Who hasn’t been in a meeting or workshop where you’re asked to keep your laptop or phone in your briefcase? More common still are the many workplaces where colleagues look askance at the laptop on the boardroom table, even if it’s there to record next actions in a meeting that is more planning session than brainstorm.

If we see banning or stigmatizing laptops and smartphones as fundamentally different (and more acceptable) than banning paper, it’s for one of three reasons: we still see paper as the norm and digital as the invader; we see handwriting as superior and worry that digital tools are making us forgetful or stupid; or we suspect that tech-laden colleagues are multitasking instead of engaging in a meeting with the attention it’s due. To advance either of the first two arguments we have to abandon the principle of “to each their own” that found such ardent defenders last week; to advance the third, we must abandon that principle and instead embrace the idea that as colleagues, we are accountable to one another for the quality of work we do in a meeting and the tools that help or inhibit that work.

My own view is that in any meeting where notes are taken — that is, any meeting to which someone might bring a notebook or laptop rather than walk in empty-handed for an unencumbered conversation — digital tools are essential (even if they are used in addition to, rather than instead of, paper).

If we want to agree that each and every one of us should be free to choose our own best way of working and our best tools for doing that work, I’ll stifle my critique of the colleague who shows up to a meeting carrying only a paper notebook. But I hope that when I or any other digital note-taker gets told to put away their laptop or smartphone, our ability to choose our own work tools will get a defense that’s every bit as passionate as the arguments that have unfolded here.