Preparing for Todays Emerging Workforce

Preparing for Today’s Emerging Workforce Preparing for Today’s Emerging Workforce Preparing for Today’s Emerging Workforce Shillan, Senior Marketing Manager, Monster continues to bring industry experts together with employers and career centers to address closing the social media gap. Utilizing social media to interact with friends online is second nature for todays emerging workforce. Extending this interaction to their job search and professional networking efforts now presents new challenges for HR professionals. Getting prepared to adapt current practices to meet current social media demands is important for employers and college career centers today more than ever. is dedicated to taking an in-depth look at social media and online networking platforms to ascertain how best to reach this next generation of job candidates. Continuing in a series of collaborative events, the most recent Social Media Summit was held in Washington DC on August 9th. The event includedpresentations from Mark Story, Author of Starting Your Career as a Social Media Manager, Tammy Gordon, Director of Social Communications Strategy at AARP andCharles Purdy, Senior Editor at Monster.com. These leading experts discussed social media, university relations and outlined career advice to gauge the current market situation and explorewhat the future holds. Focusing primarily on what companies will need and how universities can prepare these social-native young professionals. Two lively interactive panels were convened covering the topics of using social media to help close the skills gap and social media bestpractices. According to Kathy OReilly, Senior Director, Social Media Relations at Monster, the summit also examined a hot economic and labor topicfacing employers and job-seekers: the disparity between skills needed by employers and skills possessed by the workforce. Attendees included university career services faculty members, social media experts, Fortune 1000 companies and government staff local to DC. This eager group of participants provided valuable feedback expressing their need for real-life applications and tangible materials for employers to implement in their current programs to help engage the emerging workforce. embraced social media during the event when Smart Brief, the event host, speakers and the team shared key moments and quotes from the event via Twitter. This created a helpful online real-time and post-event resource for job seekers, recruiters, college faculty and employers. Feedback and online interest was very positive. This summit generated greater online conversation around the #monstersocial event hashtag, compared to previous events in the series. A complete summary of the event, video presentations and photos can be found on the Recruitment Trend blog, Thinking.