Listing Your Social Media Presence on Your Resume

Today, a member of the Law School Career Services listserve posed a question about whether it would be appropriate for a student (or graduate) to list her LinkedIn profile address on her resume. This is a great question, as it requires us to think about how Web 2.0 technologies, such as social media sites liked LinkedIn, may be affecting how we present ourselves to others, including employers.

LinkedIn is a bit more professionally geared than Facebook or MySpace, and a LinkedIn profile may include information about your background and interests that is not on your resume which may be of interest to an employer. Including your LinkedIn profile address on your resume has several advantages. It establishes you as technologically savvy and comfortable in the Web 2.0 world, it suggests that you are aware that networking is an important function for an attorney and that you are capable of getting your name out there to, perhaps, attract new business, and it faces head on the possibility that an employer will be conducting some minimal online due diligence on you as an applicant. Of course, your LinkedIn profile should be as clean and professional as it can be so it can reflect positively on you.

The mechanics of listing a profile on a resume are a bit tricky. You need to be a member of LinkedIn (it's free) to view profiles and the web addresses of profiles are long and utilize annoyingly meaningless strings of letters, numbers, and symbols (unlike other social media sites, like twitter, for example). Accordingly, it is probably best to just indicate the web address of LinkedIn in general, and leave it to the employer to search for your name.

So, jump into the Web 2.0 pool. Embrace this new technology and use it to your benefit. List a LinkedIn profile on your resume, perhaps like this toward the bottom of the page:

OTHER

Community Service: Volunteer firefighter, Central Islip, NY (2002 - 2009)
Interests: Martial arts, astronomy, and foreign films
Social Media: LinkedIn profile at www.linkedin.com

Now, doing the same for Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other social media sites presents a much more difficult question which we will address in a future article.