by justinb
16. November 2009 13:06
If you are one of the many that has leaped head first into the social networking craze than you may very well know that landing a job through social networking requires a significant investment in time. That might surprise you if you bought into all the buzz about this person or that person finding their current job via social networking.
First and foremost, social networking is a new way of communicating and engaging with people so the number of job search success stories are few and far between. Why? Two reasons:
- The players from the job board scene have migrated to social media networking sites.
- Time spent filtering the endless sea of "look at me tweets" from real job related tweets.
Even for the Brand Nubian, if you spend just a few hours on Twitter you will soon come to the realization that the usual suspect job boards are there tweet-ing away. How can you tell? From the barrage of tweets speaking more about the job board's name than providing useful job tweets from which you can benefit. Moreover, a lot of these tweets are automated originating from unmanned Twitter accounts or from Twitter accounts that are paid to repeatedly tweet the job board's name. I don't know about you but that seems a little suspect to me.
As part of getting your feet wet, with identifying who's who, with respect to paid tweeters and unmanned Twitter accounts, you will undoubtedly have to filter through a lot of tweets to get to that one tweet that provides the job lead you're looking for. It's like finding a needle in a haystack. Finding a needle in a haystack requires a bunch of time and patience. Thus, you shouldn't be in a hurry or otherwise be mislead from isolated job search success stories.
The bottom line is that with time comes experience which ultimately leads to you becoming much more efficient with using social networking in your job search. Thus, landing a job with social networking requires time and patience. It's pretty much like anything else in that you simply have to learn the strengths and weaknesses of social networking before you can capitalize on the strengths and minimize your time with the weaknesses. If you keep in mind that your focus should be on meeting new people based on targeted job tweets than you will be fine. 