Should You List Your LinkedIn or Twitter Address on Your Resume?

A question that comes up frequently as I work with my executive resume clients is whether or not it is advisable to include Twitter and LinkedIn addresses on a resume.

My answer to this question is that it depends on what kind of a LinkedIn or Twitter presence you maintain. If what you have on LinkedIn is what I would call “anemic”—thin on information about you with no strong business case for why anyone would want to contact you—I’d say no, at least not until you remedy that situation. Do you contribute as a subject matter expert to discussions and forums? Do you have more than a handful of connections? If you cannot answer yes to both of these questions, your LinkedIn profile is not going to add anything positive to the perception a recruiter or hiring manager is forming about you.

With regard to Twitter, some real caution is advisable here. If you use your Twitter account primarily or even substantially for personal, non-business related musings, I would not include the link. If you use it nearly exclusively to establish your personal “brand” and display your knowledge of matters relevant to your professional areas of expertise, then the answer would be an emphatic “yes.” Again as with LinkedIn, I would recommend building a substantial following before touting your Twitter participation—having a dozen or so followers is not likely to impress anyone with your acknowledged status in the Twittersphere as an expert in your field.

With the fact that an increasing majority of recruiters are using social media to research candidates, with particular attention to LinkedIn, it is becoming increasingly important for people who are serious about their careers to use these sites to support their candidacy. In a world where Googling candidates has become routine, leveraging social media to help ensure that positive information about you comes up in a Web search is the smart move. While you cannot control what a Google search will produce, proactively building a positive presence in cyberspace will improve your odds that the recruiter’s search will reinforce the picture of you that you have so carefully created in your resume and other self-marketing documents.

Posted by: Laurie Smith
 

Comments

[Rick Saia]

Nice post Laurie! I wholeheartedly agree! Just the fact that you have a LinkedIn address on your resume can also send the message that you have nothing to hide - provided, of course, that anything and everything on your profile will only enhance your chances of landing the job.

[Susan Guarneri]

To follow-up on Rick's comment: having a robust LinkedIn Profile demonstrates that you are social-network savvy. This can help to establish you are "technology-friendly", no matter what your age. Smart move. But the key again is to create a stellar LI Profile that reflects your personal brand and unique value proposition for the employer.

[Tamara Burns]

Great post with good points about not displaying your social media profiles unless they are "in good shape". If you don't think your social media presence is sufficient, I think your first step should be to fix those because creating your personal brand online can really help in your job search. http://www.learn.colostate.edu/blog/entry.dot?id=186935

[CarriBugbee]

The answer to this question is a no-brainer. Yes, you should include them AND you should make sure that whatever people find out about you there is helpful to your career. If the information isn't pertinent to your professional career, then your real name shouldn't be attached to the accounts. Go with a pseudonym.

The fact is, even if you don't include your social networks on your resume, employers will FIND them. Not including them on your resume will just make you look clueless. Obviously, there are exceptions to this. If you work in a profession where privacy is important (doctor, lawyer, etc.), then it may not be relevant. But in that case, is anyone really going to hire you on the basis of your resume?

BTW, you do have some control over what Google displays about you. That control comes in deciding where and how to participate on the Web. For example, most business people who are looking for a job should have a Google profile. That will always show up on page one of your Google search results. That’s a great place to put your resume and links to your social profiles. You can see mine at: http://www.google.com/profiles/carribugbee.

All your profiles on social networks will rank high in search engines, so if there is stuff you'd rather employers didn't know about you, joining a lot of networks and participating in a way that's reflective of your career-related knowledge is a good way to ensure those undesirable results get pushed way down.

@CarriBugbee

[Frank P]

I don't see any reason why you shouldn't list them. I probably wouldn't choose to do so but I don't see the harm.

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This may be stupid, but what does a linkedin profile look like on your resume? How do you write it?

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