My Current Job and the Use of Digital Tools

I work at Finnish public employment services, i.e. the Employment and Economic Development Office (TE-toimisto). TE-toimisto informs clients on its services on social media – Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. We have our own broadcasting channel te-live.fi for recruitment and information events. Clients who participate in the live events can chat and ask questions from the recruiters or employment advisors.

For data security reasons employment services cannot communicate with individual clients via Whatsapp or such channels. Even TEAMS meetings with clients have strict guidelines: nothing should be written on comments section and the client’s VPN connection must be in EU area. We do not ask clients to e-mail us. We send them a secure link to which they can reply. Our own secure e-mail messages are only available for reading for a restricted time and if a client opens our e-mail with their phone they cannot access it from their laptop later. I am guessing this does not make communicating with TE-toimisto very easy from the clients’ point of view.

Our meetings usually take place via TEAMS which is also used to store information and discuss work related matters.

The Positive and the Negative Side of Social Media at Work

Social media is a great way of letting people know about our services. It can be tricky to post social media content for a public organization. The Finnish tax authority became famous for its hilarious social media content a couple of years ago. I particularly enjoyed their Spotify readings of tax law which helped me to fall asleep many evenings. Unfortunately, the employment services has never achieved same level of success. I firmly believe our legislation has the same potential.

TEAMS, our main tool for learning an communicating, sometimes feels a bit like informal chat rather than just a way of communicating work related information. I like the way different type of information is stored and communicated in different discussion threads in TEAMS. However, when my closest colleagues start a group discussion on the weather or where to have lunch I often find it an unnecessary distraction. I’d rather have that conversation on Whatsapp on my own phone. And also the other way around: when I open Facebook to see what my friends and relatives have been up to I don’t like to see too much work related content. Many people use Facebook a bit like LinkedIn but I would rather use it to keep in touch with friends.

Five Social Media Tools and Elements of Their Successful Use

At my work at the public employment services, I need to give each new client a lot of information, which is probably not relevant to them at the moment but will be in the future. My clients come from all over the world. I am dreaming of a You Tube channel where I could easily post short videos which artificial intelligence would translate (correctly, I hope) into Kurmandzi, Urdu, Arabic, Polish, Spanish etc. All the clients, including the illiterate, would have access to this information when required, and when meeting the client in person I could concentrate on what is relevant to them at the moment. The only negative point is that it would be hard work to keep all the information up to date.

Public employment services can use Whatsapp only to give very general information such as opening hours or upcoming events. We cannot use it to discuss clients’ personal information or send messages. A lot of my foreign clients have problems understanding written Finnish, or writing it. A Whatsapp voice message could be a more customer friendly way to approach them. Apparently, data security is the problem here.  Another potential challenge is the number of contacts. When clients and colleagues contact me via the phone, SMS, TEAMS, customer database, e-mail, there might not be time to communicate with the clients via yet another channel. Successful use would require that such clients would all be assigned to one employee who would then have fewer e-mail messages to write.

Social media is a useful tool in job search. Last time when I was looking for work this was not the case so I have no personal experience. LinkedIn is an important site both for networking and looking for employment. Even if I’m not actively looking for a new job at the moment I think I should use it so that I would be able discuss its usefulness with clients. Snapchat is new, dynamic and its users are younger. It can also be used in jobsearch but it is probably best used together with another social media as the contents are not available for a long time.  Twitter as a job search tool is perhaps a more long term project. It can be used for networking and creating your own brand, like LinkedIn, and you can come across with information which may help you with job search. But in order to interact and network effectively you must tweet clever ideas pretty often.  

Many jobseekers who find it difficult to write job applications and cvs are familiar with social media and use it well to show their skills and strenghts. If the recruiters are using the same social media platforms this can be very effective. For many types of work it is not a good idea to use your personal profile where you share photos of your Moomin collection or tell about your grievances with your neighbour. Using social media successfully in job search might require creating a professional profile instead, or in addition to, one’s personal profile.

The number of social media tools for communicating with colleagues, keeping track of assigments, sharing information is overwhelming. I got to know several sites I had not even heard of before.