A JOB SEARCH APPROACH FOR THE NETWORKED AGE

Unable to sleep last night I turned on the TV and caught part of an interview (2012) with Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn. He was riffing on what it means to be networked. It went something like this: When you ask people if they are networked they say sure. I have a smartphone, tablet and laptop. To Hoffman—and I agree—that’s being networked in the Information Age. Today, networked means you have connections—you can find people and people can find you. Well, that shouldn’t be a surprise; Hoffman is the co-founder of LinkedIn. What surprises me is how many college students and recent grads when I ask how they look for a job continue to say they search the job listings. That’s the Information Age approach. In the Networked Age, you look for people with connections to companies you’re interested in, and create a path from those connections to people who can share information with you and make introduction for you to those people on your target list. My clients will tell you it’s not the easy approach but it’s the effective one.

David’s Networked Age Job Search

David graduated college smack in the middle of the Great Recession. Yet despite the high unemployment college graduates were experiencing, he landed a job. A good job just not his ideal job. Nevertheless, the company and the work provided him with opportunities to develop important workplace skills and accomplishments he could boast about on his resumé and in interviews. Two years and it was time for David to move on and start acting on his goal of working in a New York City ad agency. He started doing what most people do, looking on job boards and sending his resumé into the black hole. After 6 months and nothing to show for it, we started working together. Here’s a look into his Networked Age job search strategy.

Once David identified and understood how to market his value to ad agencies, he:

• Updated and created a master resumé
• Created a dynamic LinkedIn profile that made him finable and set up opportunities to find others e.g. joining groups, following companies and individuals
• Developed a targeted list of agencies (15 in total) based on a set of criteria very specific to his needs/wants and experience

The critical component of job searching in the Networked Age is seeing people as part of a larger web of relationships and having conversations with your trusted connections who can connect you and/or speak on your behalf to people in their network.

David’s strategy looked like this.

 

David’s ability to connect with people and to extract the right information at the right time helped him land the job he wanted. David experienced first-hand that using networks is a two-way street.

• He received relevant information he needed to open doors, and with his new job, will be able to provide others with information.
• He turned connections into professional relationships
• Some of those relationships became his champions