By David Grant Correspondent for Christian Science Monitor

Sure, you can waste hours of otherwise productive time on Facebook, Twitter, and (to a lesser extent) LinkedIn. But can you turn those time sinks into job leads?

Absolutely, the experts say. Here are the Top 10 job-hunting tricks on social media job.

10. Do it.

While it’s not a gilded path to employment, more companies are advertising and searching for new employees on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

“The first thing that people should think about is they need to do it. A large portion of the population doesn’t understand it, hasn’t tried it, is somewhat reluctant to try it,” says Josh Warborg, district president at Robert Half, a staffing and consulting firm. “It’s going to be an increasing resource because more and more people are using it as a resource.”

If it doesn’t lead to immediate job benefits now, it will give you better search skills and more contacts down the road.

“Over the next 10 years, the fact is that people are going to find more and more of the jobs over social media,” Mr. Warborg adds.

9. Understand the networks.

Spend some time looking around the networks, seeing how influential people act, how their profiles look, and the sites that they reference.

Taking a little time to get a feel for the unwritten rules of each domain will save a lot of embarrassment or awkwardness later on. For example, writing personalized direct messages to Twitter followers is a good way to build rapport without cluttering up others’ streams with brief kudos.

And there’s one thing that certainly won’t change from traditional networking and job seeking.

“Even with the casualness of social media, you want your spelling to be correct and your grammar to be halfway decent. Bad spelling is still bad spelling even in 140 characters,” says Tim Esse, a Minneapolis-based corporate recruiter who uses social media heavily

8. Follow through and follow up

Go after social media full-force. Because of its rapid nature, opportunities can appear and disappear in a flash.

“Whatever you’ve done and whatever efforts you’ve made, make sure that you’re following up on those sites regularly,” Warborg says. “If someone contacts you and you don’t respond quickly, you can lose that prospect.”

This also means having your own goals largely understood at the outset.

“Be specific about what you’re looking for,” Mr. Esse says. “Not ‘I’m looking for a job because I lost mine.’ ”

7. Don’t be a secret agent.

If you’re job hunting in social media, you’re going to have to get used to connecting with people you don’t know. That means being proactive in seeking out recruiters and being clear about your intentions as a job seeker.

“You’ve got to make sure that if you’re looking for a job, you tell people. You can’t be a silent agent or a secret agent kind of person,” Esse says. “It’s kind of like dating. If you sit in the corner, you’re probably not going to find many dates.”

6. Be careful.

You probably don’t need Job-Hunt.org editor Susan Joyce to tell you that job seekers and current employees have undermined themselves using social media. Still, before you go charging off into the great unknown, here’s a further word to the wise.

Ms. Joyce relates a tale where an employee of a large government contractor received a top secret security clearance and promptly tweeted about it.

“Clearances are sensitive things and he tweeted out to the world, and that just struck me as marginally suicidal,” Joyce says. “It was the last tweet I ever saw from the guy.”

If you already have a presence in social media, give it a good scrub.

“I would advise that you sanitize everything that [any employer] could come into contact with from a social media standpoint,” Warborg says. “If your grandmother wouldn’t think it’s a good idea to post that, don’t do it.”

Remember: Google never forgets.

“Once you put it out there, it’s there. And that’s why you need to be careful,” Joyce says.

5. Get organized.

After a while, you’re going to be dealing with a ton of information.

“I see Twitter as … bigger than all the encyclopedias ever thrown together. The Library of Congress on the floor disorganized,” Joyce says.”But if you find people you trust and you follow them, you can learn some amazing things.”

Make a routine of checking your various social media platforms. Better still, keep them organized by utilizing list functions.

“I have a list I keep adding to of recruiters who are recruiting directly on LinkedIn,” Joyce says. “Last summer there were 50, now there’s 205.”

On Twitter, list functions can also help separate different groups of people. But what makes all the difference is using a program like TweetDeck to be able to sort the information as it comes in. By allowing you to view more than one column of information at a time – either an ongoing search for a particular topic, a field devoted to a particular list, or keeping tabs on individual Twitter feeds – the fire hose of Twitter information is kept manageable.

4. Team up

While job seekers in the same industry have strong incentives not to pass along the hottest job tips, there’s still much to learn from fellow searchers and employment professionals alike.

First, Esse suggests, use searches for Twitter hash tags and Facebook fan or interest pages to find people who are both active and interested in your field. Take a look through large blog sites like WordPress or Blogger for impassioned and insightful individuals. After establishing contact with them through following, friending, or leaving comments on their page, engage them with your own questions.

Ask the people “who are taking time to tweet and to blog and to maybe update on other pages like Facebook, what their [job search] strategies are that may or may not be working.”

In addition, find people with similar interests who might not have an obvious employment angle.

“I would go out and follow people that are in my industry or even people that are tweeting about specific topics,” Esse says.

3. Be interesting

On LinkedIn, your straightforward purpose is networking in a fairly traditional model. But if your LinkedIn contacts look you up on Facebook or Twitter (or those fields bring opportunity in-and-of themselves), you’ll want to show a potential employer that you’re both engaged in your industry and have an interesting perspective to share.

Companies “are looking to see how involved a candidate is beyond a basic resume and cover letter, whether that be an application or something appropriate and really out there using social media to add some benefit to a discussion, to research, to the ongoing growth of knowledge within that industry,” Fitch says.

This doesn’t mean spewing tons of industry-related news onto your Facebook or Twitter feed on an hourly basis, Joyce points out. Instead, dive into Twitter with the mantra of finding interesting people to follow both inside and outside your intended job field. That way, you’re both expanding your knowledge of the world and pursuing employment.

They are connections that may not bear immediate fruit, but you never know. “It’s expanded my universe enormously,” Joyce says. “I know a whole lot more people.”

2. Strategize

While a YouTube résumé may be hip in some fields, in others it may give recruiters a reason to take a pass on you.

“Sometimes those tools, even from a skill-set standpoint, give them one more reason to turn you down even before they talk to you,” Esse says. “If I talked to them first and I heard they had the skills I wanted, I might look at it later.”

The point? Keep the ethos of the company you’re targeting at the front of your mind. Watch how they interact with inquiries on Twitter. Use the experiences of your contacts for clues about how to proceed.

There’s a point somewhere amidst dull, zealous, immature, and overeager that a good profile on Twitter or Facebook must strike. Whereas some fields, like marketing, might like strong personality in their prospective employees, trending toward a conservative approach insulates you from making the faux pas you might not even realize.

Someone who posts that “he hates XYZ sports team, maybe that’s my favorite team, I’ll go find someone else. It’s just not giving someone a reason to turn you down before you’re even in the game,” Esse says.

1. Manage your expectations.

“It’s still new,” Esse says. “And I think there’s a lot more buzz than maybe there was true life results so far.”

Still, Warborg estimates that “low double-digits” of job seekers are finding new employment through social media, although no definite data is available on the subject.

It’s not a magic bullet by any means. But if done right, it can pay big dividends.

“It’s generally failry low effort, high yield in that what you present online and the efforts you make to connect to people can be good for a small amount of time invested,” Warborg says.

Source: Christian Science Monitor

An analysis by the combined public policy expert of the United Neighborhood Centers of America and the Alliance for Children and Families suggests that the various jobs bills working their way through Congress as modifications of President Obama’s small business tax credit proposal could help the nonprofit sector modestly. Citing an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office, the Washington Insider blog suggests that the jobs bill will help firms add 80,000 to 180,000 new jobs between 2010 and 2011, of which 8,000 to 18,000 could be jobs in the nonprofit sector.

This isn’t huge for the nonprofit sector, though it doesn’t make much of a dent in for-profit employment either (read our analysis here). But the blog suggests that the nonprofit numbers might be a bit low, because of the nonprofit sector’s countercyclical hiring propensity (unlike business hiring which is pro-cyclical), the labor-intensive character of nonprofits, and the likelihood that nonprofits will actually use their tax credits to build their organizations as opposed to businesses’ using the credit for profits and dividends. All told, a tax credit generating only 80,000 total jobs and 8,000 jobs in the nonprofit sector makes hardly a dent in the economy—though it is important to every one of those people who might get one of those scarce new jobs. Strengthening the nonprofit employment base will ultimately require revived federal government direct spending, strengthening the shaky edifices of state and local government budgets, and a big flow of philanthropic capital from the nation’s foundations pledged to bolstering the budgets, salaries, and sustainability of the nation’s 501(c)(3) public charities.—Rick Cohen

Source: Nonprofit Quarterly

How much could American businesses save if workers were allowed to spend half of their time working from home? Here’s a hint: It’s enough to pay for universal health care.

Yesterday, I called up Kate Lister, the founder of the Telework Research Network and the author of Undress for Success. Lister, who posted some estimates in a great Inc.com comment last week in response to our virtual company experiment, has developed a model for what would happen to the U.S. economy if all the people who could work at home–a figure she puts at roughly 40 percent of the workforce–did so half the time. Here’s an overview of what our country would look like if this happened:

1. Productivity gains. Because at-home workers are generally more productive than office workers, companies would see an increase in productivity worth about $200 billion a year.
2. Savings. Besides being more productive, Lister estimates that companies would save $194 billion a year in reduced real estate expenses, electricity bills, absenteeism, and employee turnover.
3. The environment. Sending workers home reduces pollution in two ways: By cutting total electricity use (home-based workers are generally better about switching off the lights when they leave a room) and by reducing the number of miles employees travel in their cars. Lister figures that would eliminate 84 million tons of greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere every year.
4. Safer roads. Workers who drive fewer miles get in fewer traffic accidents, which would mean that 150,000 fewer people would die in car accidents.

In total, Lister thinks the savings to the U.S. economy every year would be $750 billion, roughly what the health care reform package proposed by President Obama and passed by the Senate is supposed to cost over ten years.

She has also created a model for determining the impact on local economies, using government data that takes into account commute times, distribution of labor, and local energy prices. You can plug in your hometown here.

Please keep the comments coming. You can post them below or on the original thread–or just send me an email. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting the best ones.

Source: Fresh, Inc.