When I was still in high school, I had to write my first term paper on a manual typewriter. I cringe to think about the experience. It was painful.
I kept thinking to myself how much easier it would be if I didn't have to stop mid-thought to erase what I had written so far, or, still worse, blot it out with white out. Evil stuff, that.
Thank goodness that soon afterwards, I received my first personal computer for Christmas, something that probably set the course for my adult career.
Prior to the PC, I found writing to be an odious task. It's still never easy, of course, but somehow the novelty of the word processor made the task less so.
I suspect that's what is happening now with the ongoing rise of social networks. Few of us are blessed with the gift of gab and the desire to network, especially those of us dwelling firmly in the geek community. As a recruiter, it has been my experience in the pre-social-networking days to find that asking for a name referral was usually met with head-scratching and promises to check and get back to me later. Leaving aside for a moment that perhaps I wasn't clever enough to secure those referrals then, it is certainly true now, today, that tracking down a technology professional's contacts has become a much easier task.
Social networking has taken an odious task and made a game out of it. By creating a system whereby whe build out our contacts in a public and visible way, it has become first of all easier and more fun to do so.
The way I see it, this has happened in waves. First of all, you had the early adopters, like me, the poor sods who see the potential for something new and are willing to suffer the slings and arrows of geekdom, the snarky comments of those who say "that will never have any real value." If it's a good, viable technology, it achieves broader and broader usage, perhaps only by inches at first.
At a certain point, the popularity of the new technology explodes. I think that this can most certainly be charted a few years back to Myspace first, then to Facebook, and more recently to LinkedIn (once the laggard professional community finally caught on that social networking ain't just for them crazy kids).
In this middle phase, I suspect that the growth of social networks online was driven by body count. In other words, the "game" of networking, if you will, was all about how many connections you could accumulate. The uber users tried every harebrained scheme to get as many connections as possible. I think that I even went a little nuts with this for a while with LinkedIn. To tell the truth, though, I think that the body count mentality can have drastically diminished returns after a certain point and is only necessary for people in sales or recruiting like me who want to be sure they are getting a maximized search when looking for that job seeker who is not actively in a job search, but always keeping his or her eyes open for something new and possibly better.
The game has changed, now, though. People have gotten tired of entering their information over and over again for every new social network that has come out. Instead, it's all about the portability of your data between networks and enhancing the quality of that network. If you are a technology professional and are seeking to build your online presence, it's definitely not about the numbers for you. It's about the quality of your connnections, the endorsements people have written about you on LinkedIn, the professional engagement shown in your blog, your connectedness to communities of thought leadership.
For recruiters, I think, it is about your ability to balance the need to find people while not being a network leech. On LinkedIn the other day, I came across a group that was begging "no more recruiters, please!" What this signals to me is that recruiters, bless'em for embracing the medium, are still coming down on the dark side of Obnoxious in the world of the social network. How to avoid this? The answer is simply investing more of yourself and participating in the darned community. You may have a mercantile reason for being in a social network, but if all you're doing there is hunting, grabbing names, sending solicitations, people are going to be onto you. At least part of your time needs to be spent there sincerely participating, commenting, making friends--having fun.
In the long run, it's better for everyone if the recruiter participates in this phase shift toward quality social networking. The tools are there to maintain relationships and really get to know the talent you're looking for. And the people you eventually hire will appreciate you for it.
(Many thanks to lechampiondumonde.com for use of his Creative Commons photo with attribution)
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