If you’ve decided that finding a new and improved role in your chosen creative industry is your new year’s resolution, we salute you!

The start of the calendar year often marks the end of the ‘quiet season’ when it comes to recruitment activity in marketing jobs and digital marketing jobs, and so once your CV is in order you’ve already won half of the battle.

However, a top-notch CV could count for nothing if you neglect to make sure that your social media presence paints the best possible picture of yourself – both professionally and socially.

You may have spent hours on your LinkedIn profile – after all, this is the only social media network that a potential employer will be interested in, right?

Wrong!

In the modern employment marketplace, more and more hiring personnel are taking a look at your activity on Facebook and Twitter, particularly to make sure your character traits will not land your employer in hot water further down the line.

If your LinkedIn personality (all achievements and professional motivation) is let down by a cringeworthy Facebook image of whatever you got up to on Boxing Day, or an expletive-laden tweet sent in anger during last week’s Arsenal home game, at the very least it will start to sow some seeds of doubt in the mind of whoever is thinking about progressing your job application to the next stage.

You may be reading this and thinking that it is all irrelevant because you have everything set as ‘private’ or ‘friends only’.

However, when you decide to change your Facebook global privacy settings it will usually leave anything before this time as ‘public’ – this is why some manual spring cleaning of your Facebook profile may be necessary.

As a keen candidate, you need to do everything in your power to stand out when a recruiter has a mountain of CVs for the same role, but under no circumstances will you want to stand out for the wrong reasons.

On the other hand, if your personal social media presence is all about showcasing your levels of creativity and all-round character, you really have nothing to fear!