A Job Search Shortcut: Building Relationships via Web 2.0

You were probably taught in school, or advised by your family, that the way to find a great job is to start by putting together a good resume. Then, start digging into job postings and spray it everywhere. Put together a cover letter that says "Dear Sir or Madam" and cut and paste company names and job titles as appropriate. Yes, this way still works, and yes, you can find a job this way. So I've been told. But I've never actually found a job this way, personally.

They say that 80% of the good jobs don't make it to the classified section of the newspaper. In this day and age, that also includes the major job posting boards such as Monster.com. The problem is that you're throwing your resume into a swirl of other resumes. And no matter how good your resume is, it does nothing to build a relationship by itself. With more and more resumes piling up, employers and decision makers have less and less time to spend looking at the wrong ones. If your resume is looked at, it probably won't last for more than a few seconds.

If someone doesn't know you and has never heard of you, your resume has to be a nearly perfect fit to catch their attention, and they have to see it at just the right time. That means that you'll need to send out a lot of resumes to a lot of people, and make very frequent contact, just to get noticed at all. I was told in school that I should expect to send fifty resumes to get one interview. I'd be willing to bet that the percentage is significantly lower by now.

Wouldn't it be a lot better if every person who looked at your resume knew you personally? Wouldn't they be a lot more likely to return your phone call if they had already met you and gotten a positive impression? That's not always possible in person; after all, you don't know who the decision makers are in most cases, and you probably don't know where to find them unless someone introduces them to you. To make your job search a lot more effective, you'll need to provide a means for the best jobs to find you. You'll also need to give them a good reason to come looking.

That's where web 2.0 comes in. The old ways of finding jobs are becoming more and more antiquated with time. Instead of spraying and praying, you can invest the same level of effort in leaving an internet bread crumb trail for people to find. The good news: you don't need to be an internet marketing expert, you don't need to have a web page, and you don't have to have a lot of computer skills. You just need to do the work. Read on, and throughout this hub, you can find ways to put yourself out there for many more people to find you and introduce you to the right people.

LinkedIn, if you aren't familiar with it, is becoming the resource of choice for job seekers and job recruiters. Why? Because LinkedIn is used primarily to build relationships and help people find the people they're looking for. But the key to using LinkedIn is just that: using it to build relationships first. You don't want to go on LinkedIn and start sending blast e-mails out to people asking them to hire you. (You can, but it won't work.)

After you've set up a profile on LinkedIn, find out who you know who already has a profile on LinkedIn. The idea is to "connect" to those people and start building a network. Your full network includes not only the people you connect to directly, but the people that they have connected to, and the people that those people have connected to. And if you know the name of a person who's on LinkedIn who doesn't know you, you can find out who else knows that person. Odds are, somebody you know is a friend of that person and you didn't know it. LinkedIn keeps track of these things.

For example, if you find a job posting and the name of the contact person is Bob Smith, you can look for Bob Smith on LinkedIn, and you'll find a list of matches. It will show you where they are in your network. If someone that you're connected to knows Bob Smith, you can request an introduction. That way, you can get recommended personally, and Bob Smith will know who you are before he ever looks at your resume. If, instead of using this to directly apply for jobs, you use the resource to connect with people that may be able to help you now or in the future, you can build a relationship with them. They may not have a job for you today, but a good fit could show up in a week or two.

The advantage to the LinkedIn approach is that you're more likely to be on someone's mind in the future. When you just spray resumes, you're likely to go in the dead pile unless the perfect opportunity is sitting on the hiring manager's desk the day your resume comes in. Using the old way, the burden's on you to follow up over and over again, and most of your efforts will lead nowhere. In contrast, when you get recommended and build a relationship, you'll be one of the first ones they think of when the good job opportunity comes up.

Imagine if, instead of sending resumes everywhere, you invested some time in putting together good quality profiles on the social networking sites where you're listed, such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The beauty of personal profile pages is that they're permission-based. People go to your profile page by choice, when they've decided that they're curious and want to find out more about you. This is the place where you implicitly have permission to do all the self-promotion you want, and in fact, people will scratch their heads if you don't.

So, if you're looking for work, this is a great thing to mention in the "about me" section of the social networking sites where you have listed a profile. People that you already know may come here to learn some more about you, or people who randomly hit your page may get curious. But in any case, it's up there for anyone to see. So in stark contrast to sending a resume, you're putting something out there that has the potential to be seen over and over again. When you send a resume, it'll be looked at once (maybe) and then doomed to the bottom of the pile. You'll have to send the same company another resume if you want them to look at you again, and the resume has no chance of being seen by anyone else. But a profile page never goes away.

Caveat: keep track of what you're posting and don't let it go stale. And when you've found work, make sure to update your profile pages to reflect that. People want to see current information that's relevant. If you create a lot of profile pages, you might even want to write a list or keep a spreadsheet of when they were last updated. It's a good idea to update frequently anyway. Generally speaking, social networking sites reward frequent participation. If you have information up there that's a year old, you'll have people contacting you about things you aren't interested in. (I've already had this happen.)

Finally, another good resource is the "what I'm doing" areas of Facebook and Plaxo. They feed directly into the streams of anyone that you're connected to. So, any time you have updated information, put it in your "What I'm doing" box, and this update will show up on the front profile page of anyone in your network. But it won't stay there for long. That's why you'll want to do it frequently. At least once a week is a good rule of thumb.

They say that when you're looking for a job, the first thing to do is tell everyone you know. The social networking sites provide a great framework for doing this effectively, and this way, word will get out to people you wouldn't have thought to tell.