Social Networking

Linkedin is a social networking website designed specially for professional use. I strongly believe that it helps a lot in one’s career because it helps you market yourself. It gives an easy platform for recruiters to find new hires as well as job hunters to find contacts at their target company. It also has privacy settings although some of its features are limited and you might need to purchase a plan to get access to them. As mentioned in the article, “Social Networking Technology Boosts Job recruiting” there are 130,000 recruiters on LinkedIn, I believe it’s a huge platform especially for job hunters and active networking. The same article mentions that even though a recruiter could track down potential hires pretty quickly, establishing a relationship with them online is not quite appropriate and its goes back to using a telephone. I think this is one of the limits of social networking websites since they only help us to a certain extent. There is a dark side to it because there often scams wherein fake companies advertise on these websites. In addition, it is hard to determine whether a particular candidate has posted the right information on the profile and it is not a fake profile. On the brighter side, I feel SN websites are amazing tools for personal branding. Here’s an interesting article: http://www.thedaonline.com/opinion/omg-u-need-a-job-tweet-your-way-to-social-media-success-1.1260255
There are actually people who landed jobs by posting their Resumes on SN websites, marketing themselves through Facebook ads and having their own websites to target their dream companies.