The truth about professional networking

The IT Job Board has posted a couple of blogs in the past around the subject of professional networking as an emerging tool for job hunting. We decided to dig a little deeper into this new phenomenon and find out exactly how IT professionals are using these sites and how successfully they are doing so.

Use and abuse

So everyone’s talking about professional networking sites and anyone who’s anyone has signed up for an account. But what are IT professionals using these sites for?

While some (23.7%) use it to ask questions regarding a specific topic in their field of work that could help them with their day to day roles and gather opinions from their peers, most revealed they only joined because everyone else has (22.6%) and even admitted that they don’t really know how to use it.

The most common motivation for signing up to these sites was to build a profile of business contacts (52.8%). But what is the point of having all these business contacts if you are not using them for anything?

When asked if they use these sites to look for a job the response was near enough 50:50. Surprisingly, of those that do use this medium to search for jobs, 77% informed us that they do change their status to active when looking for a job. Given that you are generally connected to many of your current colleagues on professional networking sites, my personal concern would be that your current employer would see this.

However, 83% of our survey base was actively looking when they participated in the research, which could suggest that a good number of these respondents are out of work in which case you have no employer to hide anything from.

Those that do use it, do so regularly with people checking the site multiple times a day (21.5%), once a day (27.2%) or a couple of times a week (27.2%). Hardly anyone selected less frequently.

Bitter sweet success

But, as they say, the proof is in the pudding, and just under 80% revealed that they had never landed a job through one of these sites.

So where are candidates finding jobs?

Interestingly the channels ranked the highest by candidates were more direct (job boards & rec cons) whereas traditional mediums such as print were voted the lowest, but even online magazines were not rated highly.

As it turns out, LinkedIn and other such sites do have had a dedicated jobs section of which I was totally unaware. But perhaps the reason for its limited success is due to the fact these sites are global making it difficult to find jobs or candidates in your area and that they are not specialised enough.

The future is in our hands

Professional networking sites do not, therefore, seem to be a key channel for candidates when it comes to job hunting. Survey respondents revealed that the main routes for IT professionals finding a job remained job boards (41.6%) and recruitment consultants (29.5%).

Yet over 70% stated that they believe the use of professional networking in the job seeking process will only continue from strength to strength and is not just a fad that will disappear altogether. Now all we need to do is work out how to use it properly…