Network, Network, Network
Creating the Brand of You
One of the first things we were told to do when looking for a job before the internet was to network, network, network. Let all your friends and family know you are looking for work. Join professional associations and attend their events to meet people in your desired field and learn who might be hiring. Search the newspaper classifieds for job openings. But if you wanted a good job, conventional wisdom held that you could circumvent the human resources process by finding someone who knows the hiring manager for the real jobs rather than the advertised ones. Finding a job has always been about who you know.
My first job came from doing an internship for school. I worked in community mental health in a group home for teenage boys who were in the custody of the State of Rhode Island. At that time, jobs like that were advertised in the newspaper and were mostly filled by people willing to do the job who passed a criminal background check. For the eight years I worked in human services, most of my jobs were like that. There wasn’t a hidden job market that networking would uncover unless I were looking to become an administrator somewhere. But even then, most of those jobs were advertised in the newspaper, or people were promoted from within.
I switched jobs about every two years and earned a master’s degree in between. It became evident that I wasn’t getting what I needed out of work, so I went to a career counselor, took a DISC assessment, and was told I was in the wrong line of work. I needed to be in marketing or human resources. My Dad handed me a copy of “What Color is Your Parachute” by Nelson Bolles and told me I needed to start networking. This was before businesses became interested in behavioral science, so my degree or experience wasn’t going to open any doors if I applied to HR departments. The challenges with networking for me were many. My college connections were focused on academia or working in human services. My childhood friend network was underdeveloped because my family moved every eighteen months, and my relatives lived so far away that there were no real connections there either. In short, using my limited network made finding the hidden job market a real challenge.
Eventually, I ended up working in customer service for CellularOne. They paid for web development classes, which led to getting a job with a boutique web development firm in Boston, and then doing inside sales for a software company. I was fired from both jobs for insubordination and then fell back into building websites when an internet business idea I had fell apart. I didn’t acquire any of my jobs through networking. That may be why none of them were a good fit for me, but it’s more likely that is why I became insubordinate and got fired.
Most career advice of the 80s and 90s assumed you had a network worth activating. Mine wasn't.
LinkedIn started when I was working on my inside sales job selling Lotus Notes project management software. It was a tough sell at the time because companies were moving away from Notes, so I was always looking for somewhere else to go. I got an email one day from a potential customer letting me know he was on LinkedIn and was inviting me to join his network there. One of the outside salespeople for the enterprise software group for the company said, “Don’t join that, it’s a pyramid scheme. You’ll start getting more unwanted emails from people you don’t know.” He equated it with how Hotmail operated to get new users, with your email being loaded with ads.
This was not long after the dotcom bubble burst, so people tended to be skeptical of internet businesses like this that didn’t have a clear monetization model. But for people like me, finding a way to develop loose connections was appealing. I resisted the urge to join LinkedIn during my short time in the sales role, but shortly after being fired in January 2006, I joined LinkedIn. I believe my initial intent was to stay connected with the salespeople I had worked with at Datawatch. Oddly enough, the first two people I made connections with are people I have never met and haven’t had much contact with in the 20 years I have been a LinkedIn member. One is an HR professional, and the other was a social media guru from the UK at the time. I have no idea why we became connected.
Contrast that with today: most of the connection requests I receive are either from someone trying to sell me something or from fundraisers for one of the two colleges I attended. I can safely say that I have derived no networking benefit from being a member of LinkedIn. When I was a freelancer, it did not generate any business. The biggest benefit was when I paid to post jobs, email newsletters, and other content for a recruiter client I had for most of the 17 years I was a freelancer.
Unbeknownst to me, my daughter joined in 2022. She is finishing a couple of classes for her B.S. in Electrical Engineering Technology. A LinkedIn profile was important for her to have for the job fairs she attended at R.I.T. She has over 100 connections and used LinkedIn to apply for one job for which she never got a response. In May, she walked for graduation and landed her first job two months later. She will be working for the company where she completed a co-op in 2024. When I asked her about LinkedIn, she said she didn’t have a great experience using it and didn’t like how it uses AI. Her professors talked a little bit about it, but had mixed feelings about its use of AI as well. She also conducted an impromptu, unscientific poll on a Discord server with some of her classmates, which showed an almost 50-50 split between students who found it sometimes useful and those who used it only sparingly. As always, there were a couple of outliers who either really loved or really hated it.
My wife, on the other hand, has a LinkedIn profile she hasn’t updated since creating it in 2008. She’s worked for the same company for 25 years and has a handful of connections. Networking and staying in touch with past colleagues aren’t much of a priority for her or the people she has worked with over the years.
Who Was Networking Advice Actually Written For?
Since nobody in my household uses LinkedIn for its originally intended purpose, I am curious about a few things. How are people using it today vs the early years? How has LinkedIn affected the job market through the years? What are some of the unintended consequences of LinkedIn? How has LinkedIn helped people with their careers or Business Development if they are an entrepreneur?
Please reach out if you have any LinkedIn experiences you’d like to share, past or present.