Spotlight for Career Services Professionals
May 9, 2012 

Pinterest can be a valuable way to get your messages—especially ones supported by visual examples, such as proper interview or workplace attire—across to students, alumni, and others.   

“The way that Pinterest is organized—each account is made up of boards, which are made up of pins—makes it easy to create different boards for each of these audiences,” says Brie Weiler Reynolds, the content and social media manager at FlexJobs and a former career counselor at Emmanuel College. 

For example, Reynolds says that career services offices can create boards for fictitious students to show real students how to use Pinterest for their job search, or pin job pictures related to job-search advice, inspirational quotes, career exploration, and more.  

And since Pinterest is a multimedia platform that accepts both pictures and videos, career centers that have existing YouTube or Vimeo channels with various career-related videos can post them on the site. 

Reynolds cites some examples of the ways that career services offices are using Pinterest, such as:   

• Bucknell University highlighting internships and externships through its Student Spotlights board (http://pinterest.com/bucknellcareer/student-spotlights/).
• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill creating separate boards for interview attire and business casual attire (http://pinterest.com/uncucs/).
• Simmons College spotlighting upcoming career events that are (http://pinterest.com/somcareers/events/).
• University of Pennsylvania having different boards for different careers so students can do some career research on Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/penncareerserv/).  

Reynolds advises caution and a thorough check when posting something from an outside source.  

“It’s important to check every picture’s link before you re-pin it,” she says. “If you’re pinning photos from your own career services or college website, you should be fine. But if you’re re-pinning a photo from someone else on Pinterest, click the links until you come to the original source.” 

Like any fast-growing social site, scams can creep in, and every now and then, the links have been changed to lead to an unrelated and potentially dangerous site, Reynolds explains.  

“Following each picture’s link before you repin it is important so you don’t repin anything potentially unsafe for students,” she notes.  

The easiest ways to tell if your efforts on Pinterest are effective is to watch your career center page’s “followers” and “repins” grow.  

“Each board you create allows people to ‘follow’ it, and the more followers you have, the more people are seeing the pins within each board,” she says. “As more people repin your pins, your reach grows considerably.”