Social Networking 

For this section, I'm going to concentrate on just two sites, because they are the ones I consider to be most relevant for job seekers.

The first is www.linkedin.com.

This is a must for anyone seeking a new job. It's grown massively in the recent past and is crammed full of people looking to make connections.

What's more, a lot of them are recruiters.

All you have to do is register with your email address and complete your personal profile - it's structured rather like an online CV, complete with spaces to list your previous jobs and interests.

As long as you're not using it for commercial purposes, it's free of charge, but if you want to contact existing users and invite them to join your network, there's some quite hefty charges.

I don't recommend that job seekers pay fees.

As long as you structure your profile right, you'll soon discover that people will come looking for you.

Recruiters and hiring managers are searching user profiles every day, looking for people to connect with.

They are searching by name, geographical location, skills, technical abilities, employer names, past colleagues or contacts and many other things.

So, the more information you provide, the better your chances of being found.

Some recruiters, companies and professional association members set up "groups", allowing anymore to join. This is a first class way of networking, since you can address an entire group of people at a time.

All you have to do is search the groups area and you'll almost certainly a few groups that will be of interest to you. A group is just a group of people with common interests, it's nothing formal.

These  other members will then look at your profile and hopefully, will begin contacting you.

Networking has never been this easy, so get along to Linkedin.com today.

Twitter

Twitter is not widely recognised as a recruiting tool at the time of writing, but it soon will be.

Go to www.twitter.com if you haven't already, and get yourself an account. It's free.

Enter some personal information and you're all set. You can even post a link to your own web page or to your linkedin profile.

Add a photo and you're set to go.

Next, you'll need to start finding some contacts.

The best way to do this is to conduct a search. You can search for specific key words or for employer names, locations, industry type, job title perhaps - there aren't any limitations.

When you find people who you feel might be able to help you, just click on the "Follow Me" button and you'll receive any posts they put on Twitter.

Recruiters post jobs there. So look for recruiters and follow them.

Many people will follow you back, which means that each time you post what you're doing on the site, they'll get to see what you wrote.  Here's an example:

"Looking for a job in sales, central London, not telesales, ideally engineering products. Telephone number or linked in profile"

If you have specialist knowledge to do with your current or last position, share it on twitter, by posting useful tips.

People notice. They will contact you.

Good luck!