If you're looking for a job now, you don't need to be reminded about how bad the economy and employment markets are.

But you may need to be reminded of a simple fact: You will never get hired for any job, in any economy, by an employer.

Instead, you will be hired by a person.

A person with feelings, hopes, and fears, just like you.

The more persons you can meet, talk to, and help, the faster you will get hired. In any city. In any economy.

With that in mind, I went through my past columns from this year and collected three proven ways to get hired faster by "getting personal" ...

If you are one of the six million Australians or 250 million people worldwide who use Facebook, you probably use the social networking site to keep up with your friends, write on each other’s walls and view each other’s photos.
Caught up in this breezy social interaction, it’s easy to forget all the invisible readers who may be reading your profile information and looking at the photos you just posted of your last drunken night on the town. That may include the ‘friends’ you’ve added who you actually barely know, the friends of your friends, your colleagues and – shudder – your boss. Depending on your privacy settings, total strangers may be able to view your profile – including prospective employers.

Cautionary tales are increasingly emerging of how Facebook has proved the undoing of the hapless. Many people will already have heard about Australian Kyle Doyle, a call centre worker who chucked a sickie after a drunken night out, only to be busted by his boss after posting this on his Facebook page: ‘not going to work, f*** it i'm still trashed SICKIE WOO.’ Oops.

Then there was Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank in the US, who told his employers he had to miss work to go to New York for a family emergency. When his Facebook page later showed a photo of a fairy costume-clad Colvin at a Halloween party instead of his ‘family emergency’, his manager copied the photo and emailed it around the office with the reply: ‘Thanks for letting me know – hope everything is OK in New York. (cool wand).’

Many job seekers believe that their resume is the main (if not the only) source of information on their personality. Thus, they are trying hard to make the resume an impeccable piece of writing, presenting them from the best perspective. That is a right thing to do. However, one should not neglect other sources, speaking for what we are.

Since the modern information technologies are constantly improving and thus are earning the credence of a wider audience, on-line resources have become a recruiter’s number-one advisor. This means that all Internet activity under the real first and last names can be tracked by a prospective employer and used for forming a favorable/ unfavorable impression of an applicant’s personality.

Thus, strongly embed the idea in your mind: Human Resources specialists do not only background checks, but also hold on-line ‘investigations’. Scared?

Good news everyone! You can control a great deal of what is said about you on the Internet. It just requires some time and a little effort, since you need to review the following: