Have you ever heard of the saying, 'It's not what you know but who you know'?
Well, welcome to the 21st
century where that is abundantly true. An estimated 80% of mid-to-senior level
job offers are the result of networking. As the saying goes: Your network is
your net worth. So we need to get out there and expand our network, but we also
need to be sure we invest in branding our-self to stand out while doing it.
You have to start thinking of yourself more as a business then a person. For example, by going to college you are investing money into bettering your brand. The better you can brand yourself and promote that brand-- the better you will do in getting the best of the job market.
So the real question is how should we brand ourselves now, in the age of social media. There are a lot of resources out there, but the one ranked the highest would have to be LinkedIn. Imagine that you took Facebook, and instead of posting about how your day has been, you post about
your work experience, past employment, skills, and everything else you normally put onto a paper resume. On LinkedIn your "friends list" is your new business network. You can connect to prospective employers, past employees and anyone else that you might find worthy. It has truly become the new generation of resume, especially considering that most employers will check your LinkedIn to learn more about you. In fact 93% of job recruiters tap into LinkedIn to find qualified candidates.
Hi Jonathan, I think you explained the importance of networking very well in this article. I was not surprised by the fact that 80% of mid-to-senior level job offers are the result of networking. I think this has been going on forever because how are you gonna just put a stranger into such an important job? The traditional way of verifying a candidate's competency has been through references and this has not changed. But LinkedIn makes it a lot easier to find a reference by looking at a candidate's profile. Overall I think this is a good article except your 1st picture is not loading properly. Everything else is good.
ReplyDeleteHi Jonathan,
ReplyDeleteYour whole blog is so amazing, and I really like your blog theme. Especially, this post itself was very informative yet easy to read by posting clear quotes from your reference site. I don't really have much to say about it other than to keep up the great work. You explained the purpose and use for LinkedIn well. I also agreed that LinkedIn will be a lot easier to find a reference by looking at a candidate's profile. Your post meets the minimum requirement that is 1 image and have reference sources at the end. Overall, everything is good. Keep up the good work!
Hey there. After reading this post, I do find the red hyperlinks against the grey background a little hard on the eyes, but that is a small detail, and as another commenter pointed out, your first image is not loaded properly, so that is something to keep in mind in the future. As far as your actual blog post, I like that you used statistics like how 80% of higher-level jobs are obtained via networking. You do introduce LinkedIn, but I am not sure if you really elaborate on how it aside on how it is essentially Facebook for prospective employees. The fact that you say to think of oneself as a business rather than a person is, I feel, a bit impersonal though.
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