As Labor Day weekend winds down, I was wondering how many people actually find jobs via online social or professional networking. The first thing I was told to do when I was laid off was to get involved as much as possible with various networking sites. I joined everything I could and have participated in professional online discussions on a regular basis. Recently, I started this blog just to step things up a bit. Short, meaningless blurbs on Twitter just isn't my style. But I am truly immersed in this stuff.
Has it been worth it? Am I more likely to be hired or do I appear more tech savvy because of saturation networking? I think the jury is still out, but a verdict is nearing.
I am wondering whether online networking actually produces results for job seekers. Nine months into this and all I get for all my online interactions is the occasional "hang in there" or generic advice about seeking out freelance jobs. I also get a ton of junk mail now, mostly from insurance companies trying to get me to sell policies on commission. Even less reputable scams have filled my inbox since I have thrown my hat into sites like CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com. Those are job sites and not networking sites, per se, but they still seem as ineffective as the interactive, social sites. Even targeted job databases, like journalismjobs.com, seem fairly ineffective.
Yes, sites like LinkedIn are interesting and sort of provide a way to stay in the conversation through smart interactive options, but does anyone have any data on how many people are hired through networking on LinkedIn or any other site or database? Perhaps it depends on the field one is in. As a journalist, I haven't had any luck, but that could be because journalism is hurting right now. Yet, every media company nowadays demands that reporters and editors have web-savvy knowledge and skills. Having those things, however, is no guarantee that you will find or keep your job. You can seemingly get fired just as easily for spending too much time on Facebook as too little time on it. I often find myself wishing we could go back to judging potential job candidates on their work ethics, abilities, talents, intelligence and not on whether they know how to type with their thumbs or make smiley faces in messages sent from their iPhones.
You can Google my name and find out almost anything about me, from my musical interests to my vast professional experiences. You can find videos of my bands on YouTube. You can read my old newspaper clips and see which states I've lived in. You can view pages that I have helped design or read numerous professional recommendations of me written by my former colleagues. Yet, despite this significant online presence, I have not always felt that plastering myself all over the Internet has been time well spent.
Are social and professional networking sites truly benefiting anyone other than the people who profit from these things? Are some employers placing too much weight on whether you actively blog or have a MySpace profile? I guess as I continue to blog and interact on other sites, I will discover whether there are practical benefits to spending so much time online.
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