PepsiCo Employee Blog

From audience member to panelist

One of my friends was a co-presenter at SXSW Interactive for a session called “Using Social Media to Score a Job.”   I do recruiting for PepsiCo was sitting in the front row with two other recruiters that leverage social media to find talent.   The session was designed to be a discussion around tactics for candidates to use in the job hunt.

About halfway through the presentation, a member of the audience asked one of the co-presenters a question about the best ways to get your resume into a company…and that’s when things changed!   Our friend the presenter said, “Well, we have three recruiters right here in the front row, so why don’t we ask them?”  The session quickly changed to an informal panel discussion – with me being one of three people answering questions and offering tips and tricks to job seekers. 

Audience members were asking for our opinions around LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook in the employment process and we were also critiquing their tactics.  There were a lot of best practices shared and advice given to them- some which was totally counter to their tactics.  You can imagine why the crowd started referring to the three of us as the American Idol judges after a while.    It was great to be able to help a number of people in their search for a new role.

6 Comments on “From audience member to panelist”

  • Scott Kinnear

    I’m curious now as well…Can you give 3 quick tips?

    March 16th, 2010 1:49 pm

  • Jim Schnyder

    Here are three things I shared:

    1. LinkedIn is the major place in the social media space where recruiters are finding passive candidates. Make sure your profile is as close to 100% completed as possible. If you want a recruiter to “find” you, this will be the way.

    2. Leverage GROUPS in LinkedIn. Many recruiters post jobs or send messages to group members.

    3. My best tip – If you see a job of interest on the web on Indeed.com, Monster, etc., my recommendation is to do a quick LinkedIn search for that company to see if you know anyone at that company prior to applying. You can send a resume to your friend and ask them to submit it through the corporation’s employee referral program. The audience in the breakout session really liked this tip….

    March 16th, 2010 5:24 pm

  • Christie Linebarger

    Which American Idol judge did they liken you to, Jim? :-) Sounds like a great time, and that group of job seekers got lucky to hear tactics from the best of the best!

    March 16th, 2010 9:46 pm

  • Jim schnyder

    They said I was like Randy and Hoyt was like Simon. :-)

    It was a good session. Sxsw should look into more like this.

    March 17th, 2010 10:54 pm

  • Carol Wilson

    As someone adept at using LinkedIn to research and connect during my job hunt, I haven’t had much luck using my GROUPs. With the “job hunter” groups, the postings seem to be pretty random and rarely related to my search. And when participating in my industry-related group discussions, it seems a long-shot that someone will see my posting amongst the 100’s of replies.

    I use tip 1 and 3 every day. Are GROUPs really effective ways to become more visible to recruiters? I’d love the advice.

    March 19th, 2010 5:19 pm

  • Jim schnyder

    Hi Carol – we typically are not reading posts. When we are looking for specific backgrounds or people with special certifications, we will “join” the group and then have the ability to search members profiles. This is typically the model for “finding” members of groups. The other way is to send a targeted email to members of the group with a job posting.

    Glad to hear that you use tip one and three. – Jim

    March 19th, 2010 6:33 pm

Leave a Reply