The Internet is Your Resume — Enter WhyHire.me
The Internet is Your Resume — Enter WhyHire.me
Ottawa, Canada (PRWEB) September 1, 2009
It’s not hard to find horror stories about people not being hired because of a non-existent or questionable Facebook profile or online presence. But a new program holds the promise of helping students define and build their online brand and help them get hired. WhyHire.me Corporation, a developer of tools and curriculum for personal branding through post-secondary education, today announced the availability of WhyHire.me. The program includes online or instructor lead curriculum, a comprehensive e-book and an online personal profile that each student can securely develop through post-secondary education.
WhyHire.me was developed alongside Algonquin College in the spring of 2009. Faculty members saw a gap between today’s social media tools and the need to coach students through the new rules of online communications, job search and personal branding. “We saw the shortfall between Facebook and Linkedin,” said Wendy Threader, Professor at Algonquin College. “We wanted a place to teach the underlying communications skills and help our students demonstrate their potential to future employers when they were ready.”
The WhyHire.me program incorporates coaching, mainstream social media tools and branding techniques that aim to help students clearly define their unique positioning and help them demonstrate passion, initiative or leadership in their chosen fields or industries they want to pursue. “The underlying techniques associated with personal branding do not come naturally to students today,” stated Patti Church, co-founder of WhyHire.me. “Personal branding needs to be taught and it requires a certain amount of institutional instruction, mentoring and incentives to help students develop new skills and build confidence. WhyHire.me is not limited to just public relations or marketing students. It provides the means for any post-secondary student in any discipline to develop their brand and learn the tools and techniques associated with 21st century communications.”
“By aggregating the latest social media tools such as blogs, Twitter, Flickr, Vimeo, and RSS into an interactive profile, we provide the means to help create professional connections with future employers” says Andy Church, co-founder of WhyHire.me. “We advocate a clean break from Facebook to develop one’s brand with peers, professors and third parties. No matter how much fun sharing content online can be, party photos, sarcastic wit and gaming scores should be shared amongst friends, not professional contacts.”
Algonquin College is expanding beyond its initial pilot to allow several hundred students access to the program this September. The School of Business at Centennial College is also rolling out WhyHire.me to select classes this fall. “WhyHire.me incorporates several best practices into a unified branding process,” said David Johnson, Dean of the School of Business at Centennial College. “We believe our students will be able to better articulate and demonstrate their unique skills and experiences relevant to the jobs they will seek when they graduate.”
The Sprott School of Business at Carleton University is piloting WhyHire.me within its Marketing: New Tools and Approaches class. “The purpose of this course is to focus on new, leading edge marketing practice and theory,” said Leighann Neilson, Assistant Professor, Sprott School of Business. “We believe WhyHire.me will provide our students with the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in the application of new technologies, such as social media, to marketing problems. The personal branding components of WhyHire.Me will give our students the opportunity to assess how well these new marketing tools work, as well as help them differentiate themselves and enter the job market with crisp positioning, delivered through a personal WhyHire.me URL.”
WhyHire.me is currently available through participating post-secondary institutions. It includes 8 hours of instructional learning that can be easily integrated into existing communication, technology or business courses, or offered through a general education class. The curriculum and accompanying e-book cover the 4 D’s of personal branding: Dig Deep, Declare Your Brand, Display Yourself and Deploy Your Brand.
About WhyHire.me Corporation
WhyHire.me Corporation develops tools and curriculum for personal branding through post-secondary education. Its founders have a passion for learning and sharing best practices in branding, marketing communications and technology. More about us at http://whyhire.me
Contact Information
Andy Church, co-founder
http://whyhire.me/andy_church
cell 613.883.7505
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