Posted under Job Search, Networking, Social Networking on May 16th, 2008
Is using a social networking site during your job search really networking?
Not according to this post from The Pongo Blog.
Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and others are great tools to help you keep in touch with your friends and get introduced to new contacts, but they don’t substitute for face-to-face and over-the-phone networking.
Sorry, introverts!
I agree with the post that it’s easy to believe that we as job seekers are networking when we are merely engaging in brief interactions with strangers. It may be fun, it may be amusing, and we may be meeting all kinds of interesting people, but these people are not the ones who are going to think of us and contact us when they hear about a job.
Cultivating and maintaining a network of people who are going to rely on one another for important things, like referring job leads, still requires personal contact. We build trust with people after we’ve seen their faces and/or heard their voices.
If you found out about a great job opening in a different field from yours, wouldn’t you think of the people you know personally before moving on to the people you’ve met online?
Social networking sites are great places to find out about restaurants, what your friends are up to, what’s happening at a certain company, and who might be hiring. They can be excellent tools to help you secure an introduction to someone you’d like to meet.
But the way to effectively work your network as a job seeker remains decidedly low-tech.
Am I just a GenX fuddy-duddy on this issue, or what? Please let me know your thoughts.
Posted by Heather Mundell
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Barbara Safani on 18 May 2008 at 9:17 pm #
Heather,
While I agree with you that face to face networking has to be a big part of anyone’s networking strategy, I do believe that on-line networking builds enormous efficiencies into the process and that it’s a “must have” strategy for today’s job seeker.
I have built and strengthened numerous relationships with people who I met on-line…some I’ve met in person and some I hope to meet in the future. Either way, on-line networking creates conversations and touchpoints with people who I otherwise may not have met and the relationships are real, not superficial. Like any relationship, the key is to be authentic and always try to give more than you get.
Heather Mundell on 18 May 2008 at 11:54 pm #
I appreciate hearing about how you use on-line networking!
When networking online leads to real conversations, and we employ the techniques we do in face-to-face networking, such as being authentic and offering our service to others, it’s really at its best.
When we spend too much time collecting contacts and not connecting with them or building actual relationships with them, we don’t get very much out of the online networking tools.