Make the Most Out of Today

Average life expectancy of a Hong Kong person is 83 years. That's roughly 30,300 days. Ironically it sounds shorter than 83 years. So make the most out of every day. Focus on today. Make sure you are on a right path and find the purpose of your life.

7 tips in setting up your LinkedIn or Facebook profile for Job Hunting.

Social Networking sites let your profile to be seen by the public efficiently and effectively; thus making it one of the preferred tool by professional recruiters to look up your information. If you want to win the recommendation from the head hunters or those recruiters actively search talents like a head hunter, you want to make sure that you have an impressive profile on some of the social networking sites. If you do it properly, you can setup your social network sites to help you:

• to be “searched” by recruiters,
• connect your way to the right recruiters so you can offer your service to them directly
• to brand yourself in ways beyond that CV can offer.

Whether it is Facebook, LinkedIn or other social networking sites, the strategies in using the social network are quite similar. They are not rocket science at all. Anyone with a bit of discipline can build up a very useful profile. The following is a list of things to do with your social networking sites:

1) Setup your personal Social URL.

It is called the vanity url in facebook or public profile url in LinkedIn. So instead of a long and hard to read url, you get url like mine http://www.facebook.com/stanleysuen and http://www.linkedin.com/stanleysuen.

2) Provide details in your online profile.

Filling up your profile is no different from writing a proper CV. Despite of the virtually unlimited space, your potential recruiters still have very limited attention bandwidth. So do consider carefully what information are the right ones to be posted on your CV. At the least be careful with the priority order so your key advantage points are show on top of other points.

3) Connect to the right people.

While we are all tempted to build up many friends connection, I do believe that quality is more important than quantity. Unless you are a emarketer who wants to build up a large database of people, having too many people will make the important people, whom you should associate your personal brand with, hidden by the large numbers of connections. Chose those people who has got a reputation in your industry.

4) Join the right groups or networks.

Connecting to the right professional groups will help you to connect to the right people and enhance your personal brand as well.

5) Ask people to be your reference or to endorse you.

Ask your friends to write reference for you. It’s a great piece of supportive information for your online cv.

6) Show your social url in your blog or twitter accounts.

If you have a blog such as Blogger, Word Press or even twitter account, you can show your vanity url or profile url on your blog. Blog is really a great way to post publication information for the search engine to find you. Having your blog pointing back to your social network profile url means that you are optimizing for the search engine to find you in the right way. This is in fact a “link building” strategy in Search Engine Optimization strategy.

You can also connect your posts on your blog or twitter accounts to your social sites such that you don’t have to copy and paste your information in multiple sites. This will enrich your social network profile efficiently. For example, if you have a blog on blogger, you can enable your RSS feed and use it to feed your blog post to your facebook account. You will have to install a facebook application that read RSS feed for you. Just use the key word “RSS” to search in the “Application Directory” and you will find plenty of free applications that can help you to accomplish this

7) Be careful of what you say the social sites.

I guess I don’t have to elaborate this in details. If you are serious about your professional image for your career, make sure you post appropriate information on your social site than.

Hope you find this useful.

Your CV & your Social Networking Site

Personal Branding for Career – Your CV & your Social Networking Site

With the advancement of social networking, recruiters are increasingly leveraging the internet and the social networking to find the talents they need. Therefore, if you consider yourself a “Career Person”, you need to be very carefully building up your profile through your social networking site, be it your public profile and what you post on blog, facebook, linkedin or others.

In fact, smart recruiters will probably “google” you to find more about you beyond the CV you have submitted. So if this is going to be a fact of life, why not show your blog address on your CV or make your facebook public profile available to the recruiters. Doing so means that you are a much in tune with the new age of digital, which I believe is an added advantage in today’s digital society, and you are professional enough to show your muscle in front of your to-be employers.

Not sure if they still say that or not, that a CV should be no more than 2 pages. I agree to some extent. My CV was 7 to 10 pages all the time. The different is that there is a 2 page “mini-CV” within the 10 pages CV. It’s kind of like an Executive Summary of a proposal. Page 3 to 10 are there to function supporting information or appendix material. The formula works for me very well as my CV did not overwhelm my potential employers but yet they have the opportunities to dig deeper into me if they found me interesting.

Indeed, “Interesting”, is a key point. Frankly if your CV is very interesting, the recruiter will spend their time to read many pages. But you have to be indeed “Interesting” to earn their attention. Do not assume that people have to “respect” your CV and they will read it line by line. No way. It is your job to make your CV interesting! We can talk more about this in future. For now, I think one of the easy ways to expand your CV without too many words is to attach a link to your blog or social network profile. It’s a great Multi-media Appendix material for your CV.

天作之盒 - 彩虹下的约定

尋著你的那天

尋著你的那天 (曲詞:盧永亨)

在那一天 我在塵世尋著你
從前孤單 我從此不記起
你賜盼望 承諾這愛永沒盡期
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