Financial Services & Recruiting academyrecruiting on 01 May 2008 12:00 pm
Social networking, “digital dirt”, and your job search
The whole discussion about Web 2.0, social networking, and where that plays for job seekers is something I’ve alluded to before, and can be very complex. There’s a nice brief overview article at CFO.com from a few days ago titled “Companies Give “Web Search” a New Meaning” that provides some pretty simple examples of what’s going on out there right now, specifically with companies’ use of social networking sites.
Here’s some key numbers from the article. According to ExecuNet, the percentage of hires by the way they are found stacks up like this:
- old-fashioned networking - 39%
- online search engines - 14%
- online job postings - 13%
- resume databases - 8%
- social networking websites - 3%
As you can see, while in this survey online social networking per se hasn’t really taken off, online sources together already account for as many hires as traditional face-to-face networking.
More key numbers from ExecuNet:
- 77% of executive recruiters use search engines to learn more about candidates.
- 35% of the same recruiters eliminated a candidate based on negative information (”digital dirt”) that they uncovered online.
That’s a subject we talked about a long time ago (“Take control of your online reputation”) - this is just one more confirmation of what we said back then.
There are lots of social networking sites to choose from, and also lots of arguments about which ones are the best to be on. That discussion is way too long for here, but I’ll just say that my favorite is still LinkedIn, and if you’re only going to be in one social networking place online, that’s the place to be.
But, as we’ve said before (“If you want to be found, you’ve got to be findable”) , you need to be on at least one of the top sites, and you need to make sure that the information you post online reflects positively on you.
