Personal Branding Interview: How Hans Mestrum Got a Job via Twitter

To continue with our series on people getting jobs via social media, I give you Hans Mestrum. Below are a few questions I asked him to get a more in-depth look into how social media landed him a job. To make this story even sweeter, I come across him on Twitter.

What is your background, and how did you first get started with social media?

I am a teacher from Origin and worked at a school for 9 years. After that I moved to Tulip Computers and worked there for 19 years in the education business as a trainer, product manager, training manager, business unit manager and managing director. My last job there was Sr. strategic business developer/trend-watcher.

In this job I used a lot of social media and did a lot of presentations and workshop on social media (about 5 years ago) and set up my blog and my online presence (just type “hans mestrum” in Google).

When you first heard about Twitter, what were your initial thoughts?

First I did not see the potential of it but after a couple of weeks I started tweeting. I think someone invited me to join.

You were able to get a job through Twitter. How did you come upon this opportunity, and how long did it take to get hired?

I just tweeted the fact that I was in search of another job and someone of the university who was following me on my blog and Twitter saw this tweet and introduced me at the dean of the faculty of technology. I did not know him. Just followed his blog and he followed mine. He wrote 2 pages as a recommendation letter, based on my online presence. It was amazing to read how accurate it was, thinking of the fact that he did not know me personally.

An interim manager who wanted to set up an interview ASAP contacted me that same evening. The next working day I was meeting with the dean and two directors of the faculty and next day I was hired. So this is really twitterspeed.

There was no job, no vacancy, no description whatsoever online.

I was hired as new media specialist/blogger on the staff of the dean of the faculty. I report directly to her.

In your current job, do you use Twitter for businesses purposes? Has this opportunity changed your initial perspective of Twitter?

I am using all kinds of social media now to present the faculty and myself. I blog, tweet, yammer, video blog and anything interesting that students and teachers need to know about. People like it although some of my colleagues wonder what all this stuff does. But by just doing it they see the relevance of it.

What is HAN University of Applied Sciences, and how has social media – especially Twitter – helped you in your role there?

HAN University of Applied Sciences is a high school in Arnhem en Nijmegen (towns in the east of the Netherlands) with 25.000 students and about 2400 employees. We have an education, management/economics, health and sport and technology track.

I work on the faculty of technology and I am responsible for putting the faculty on the map by means of social/new media.

Do you teach others about Twitter now?

I did some presentation and guest lectures about new media. On some websites I am a HRM case in which my case is explained as the new way of job hunting.

Congratulations to Hans! Tell us if you know anyone who got a job using social media so we can feature them next.

Check out these related posts:

• Personal Branding Interview: How Mark Cummuta Got a Job Through Twitter
• The Social Media Mullet: Business in Front, Party in Back
• Twitter Success Story: How Twitter Got Doug Haslam a Job
• Social Media Used in Schools
• Twitter Personal Branding Strategy: Get the Most Out of Re-tweets

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