For my recent job switch it took me 1 week to speak with 3 companies, sign a deal with one and double my salary in the process. Oh, and I did it all with social media…

You might be saying, “But Sean, I thought social media was simply a device for telling your friends what you ate for lunch“.

Well of course that is true, however you can also use these services to land that next great gig. For those curious, or perhaps looking for a social media job, here is how its done.

• LinkedIn: Take your paper resume and throw it away. In the tech space LinkedIn is the new resume. Build out a nice large network by tracking down any former/current colleagues. Get them to leave you a recommendation whenever possible. SEO the shit out of your profile, include every major keyword from your industry. This is ultimately how Docstoc.com came across me, via a recruiter who found me through a LinkedIn search. Big thanks to Dan and Jason at Neohire who setup the whole deal for me. Add me to your LinkedIn network to get started.

• Twitter: Oddly enough I had an interview with another company because of Twitter. Stranger still, it was with a start up I was razzing in a recent tweet. They used tracking services to follow their company’s name and it started a dialogue between us. While this case is probably unique, a good Twitter presence is vital to getting any social media job today. At Mahalo we managed to get a nice amount of traffic from the service. Due it part to Jason’s large following and the vertical based Twitter accounts I setup. You have an MBA? Good for you, but who cares if no one is following/listening to you today. You can follow me on Twitter here.

• Meatspace Marketing: I was able get a few potential jobs lined up through through this medium. The meatspace is that strange place away from the web. Its where real people exist and occasionally interact in a none virtual fashion. Become part of your local tech community and get to know the players. Contribute so they can all see how great you are. Read Chris Brogan’s post on how to be sexier in person.

Happy hunting!

You may have already read over on Jason’s blog that Mahalo is looking for a great system engineer in los angeles. As our traffic keeps growing its more and more important we have the right people behind it, manning the systems and keeping everything running smoothly.

Here is the job description:

Please send your deets to jason at mahalo.com and cc mark at mahalo.com with the subject line “I kick ass“

Systems Engineer, Los Angeles
Mahalo.com, Inc. is a new human-powered social search service backed by Sequoia Capital (the world’s #1 venture firm), Newscorp, CBS, Elon Musk (Paypal founder), and others. This kind of opportunity is extremely rare in LA: these high-profile rewards are usually found only in Silicon Valley.

We’re looking for a seasoned Systems Engineer. You should be expert in massively scalable architectures, how MySQL and Linux interact, how MySQL and memcache interact, sharding, replication (including multiple
master replication) and how to tune MySQL based on various schemas for maximum performance and availability. You are a HANDS ON implementor, a get-it-done kind of developer. The right person is a self starter with the “general get it factor”. You work well with a team of like-minded engineers, and have a genuine desire for excellence.

You should be expert with:
Applications: PHP 5.x, MySQL 5.x, memcache 1.2.x
Protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, Unicast and Multicast socket programming
Scripting languages: Unix shell scripting
Other languages: Applicants with C, Java, and Objective-C experience preferred
Bonus: Hadoop / HBase, Lucene, Nutch, Spread

As a bonus, if you can help find the right person we are offering a $1000 bonus and tickets to the upcoming TechCrunch50 event (a $2000 value). We have a great team at Mahalo is there someone out there up for the task?