Every week, NETSHARE hosts Ask the Coach, a phone-in coaching session with leading career management experts. Here is an excerpt from a recent session with our newest career coach, Kristin Speer of Accelerated Search Consulting.
This week’s Ask the Coach call included a lot of discussion about managing your Internet presence. Coaches agree that it’s important to be able to be “found” online, but how do you manage your online identity, and how do you find others who can help you in your quest for a new career. Kris had a number of insights that were very useful.
When using LinkedIn, for example, a number of callers were concerned about the public nature of changes to your LinkedIn profile. These updates could alert your boss or your co-workers to the fact you are looking for a job. The easiest solution, of course, is to change your profile settings. You can set the privacy settings for your LinkedIn profile so others can’t see your profile updates. Simply log in to LinkedIn, and click on the “Settings” link on the upper right of the top menu bar. You now can adjust your profile settings, including privacy. Just change the settings under “Profile and Status Updates” so others won’t see when you change your profile settings.
There also was a question how to find email addresses of contacts at companies that interest you. Is there a way to find the contact information for hiring managers? Kris recommends starting with resources like Jigsaw.com. You also can “google” email addresses using the company’s base URL signature and some wildcards. For example, enter “%@spencerstuart.com” where % is the wild card, and be sure to enter the search term in quotes. It doesn’t always work, but when it does, you will be presented with multiple pages, and you will have to scroll down to find the contact you want. Boolean search strings also are useful. You can use a string line (email | mailto | contact) * kornferry.com, again remembering to put in the company URL and then sift through the results.
If you have identified someone you wish to reach but don’t see their email address listed in the search results, take a look at the format the email addresses take, e.g. john.smith@company.com or jsmith@company.com. Chances are you can make an educated guess at the correct email address and reach the party you are targeting.
