The Journey to Become a STAR

The application process for getting a job sucks. You spend hours crafting a perfect cover letter and pour over every detail of your resume. Even then, if you don’t use the right keywords or include the right information all that work will probably end up in a garbage can. Heck, I was lucky. Your Brand Voice didn’t even ask me for a resume. My cover letter was a series of emails, my qualifications were told through my Klout score, and my resume was my Linkedin profile. This is the new hiring process, a social hiring process.

Last week, the STARs and I decided to sit down and rewrite the job description for an intern in the social media world. Well, we didn’t actually sit down together; we held a Google Hangout while one of us was in Florida, the other was in India, and I was two letters away - in Indiana. What we wanted to rewrite was the process of becoming a STAR. (Social Trending Assessment Representative).

Combining the ability to work remotely in digital marketing as well as the necessity for any employee to quickly learn something not taught in school, we quickly realized that the job description we were writing was not something to be decided based on a cover letter or resume. The qualifications should be how social you are, the resume will be how much time and effort you put into making your Linkedin profile ‘just right,’ and your cover letter will come in 140-character sized chunks.

The process of becoming a STAR doesn’t just start at the top; you work your way there. I started as an unpaid intern, 1000 miles away from any other YBV employee, and I had to make my presence known. I learned quickly that, as ‘social’ a job working in social media is, you have to be just as social within the internal organization. Making my presence known on GroupMe, the daily communication tool, was my main duty as an unpaid intern (eMail really is the new snail-mail). The other thing that became a priority was to ask questions. Sometimes they were questions about how to better promote the student chapter of the American Marketing Association I helped start up (and might I say a great starting point for a future-STAR), but usually they were questions about how I could fit into the Your Brand Voice team as an active player with my own role.

Being an unpaid intern, your main salary is that of knowledge and experience, so asking those questions was my form of asking for a raise. At a certain point, my presence in the Florida office was felt even though I was in Indiana at the time. Here, I moved from an unpaid intern into paid-intern-status, and I had that extra motivation to produce even better quality work.

Your Brand Voice has a unique way of pushing a person to 100%. If that person is fit to be a paid employee, they’ll push themselves to 110%. So when Miguel, Ishaan, or Bryan see this in a person, they know it’s time to take them off the bench as an unpaid intern, give them more responsibility, and see how their motivation changes with a little money in their pocket. At this point, their presence is felt when they’re not in the office, and it’s time to see if they’re STAR material. They’ll get to fly down to Orlando, sleep tight in a hotel, and spend time with the team. If a good feeling is mutual, they’ll have the opportunity to continuously enjoy the beautiful weather in the most wonderful place on earth… the Your Brand Voice World Headquarters (and don’t forget to check in on Foursquare).

Alan Strahinic

http://www.linkedin.com/in/straynick

For more information about Your Brand Voice and the many different opportunities we have available for future STARS, please visit our website.  http://yourbrandvoice.com/social-media-job-openings.

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