85% of jobs are filled via networking
zippia.com
zippia.com
- "Business Pundit. “25 Best Places to Network""
- "Undercover recruiter. “Why Employee Referrals are the Best Source of Hire”
.. and a bunch of corporate blogs.
Imo the article has been referenced well even if the references are mostly second hand; it repeats claims made by other articles which may also be repeating claims made by others.
To me, the key fact that I wanted to check in on was this
> Up to 70% of employees received their current company position through networking.
The reference for this probably comes from a 2017 linkedin survey[1] which polled 15,905 linkedin members in 2016 and received this as one of their answers
> ... 70 percent of people in 2016 were hired at a company where they had a connection
I find that this kind of stands at odds with the words "received their current company position *through* networking." That makes it sound like the networking was the reason they were able to get the job. The linkedin statement makes it seem like that's just how they may have found out about the job. I won't accuse the article of directly saying what I'm assuming it means. But I also think the rewording changes the meaning too much for me.
Wherever I have worked, whenever there's been a job opening I have forwarded it to friends who might be interested. For the ones who got into the job, they had a connection, but that had absolutely zero weight on whether they got hired or not. I was just a more efficient job board promoter.
Not to take away from everything in the article but I definitely would encourage people to break any numbers they find interesting down into what they might actually mean by visiting the sources and trying to read into the claims fully.
[1]: https://news.linkedin.com/2017/6/eighty-percent-of-professio...
Referrals from bad employees don't mean anything, but referrals from good employees do. All of the interview hoops that people jump through and still the most consistently reliable way to hire a good employee is to have a referral from an existing good employee.
Also, just in case it’s helpful, the zero weight statement was related to the folks I connected with. Not referrals in general.
Basically, as your comment reveals to me, there’s a lot of nuance here and the article generalizes it away into a statement that doesn’t feel accurate.
Since it was a LinkedIn poll, it might have been interpreted as "had a connection in LinkedIn that worked at the company". Which can mean a lot of things, including being "connected" to somebody you've never even had an internet conversation with, didn't cite when applying for the job, etc.
Ok. Not 100% sure of the statistical validity here.
I spent a lot of time studying and not networking in university; my family was (and is) mostly asocial (the prototypical hard working first generation immigrant), and no one really clued me in. I didn't get that important context until years later (thank you internet)
Living without a network in a foreign city, I managed to move from tiny 1000$/month contracts to consulting gigs then to a bigco. Every step was accomplished by meeting people, and solving problems, and then having them tell other people about me (and a blog article that weirdly went viral in the small space I was in). This might sound like an RPG, but it was not fun and the constant terror about missing rent was something I'm glad to have moved past. I don't recommend this at all, I'm way behind someone who got hired out of school by a friend at a BigCo.
As a result, I have a lot of sympathy for people without a network and I try to evaluate them fairly when I hire people. Sadly, without a prior relationship, it's hard for the evaluator and the evaluated to really know what to make of each other. It's always going to be easier to hire someone you know or someone a friend vouches for, as you will have the ability to have trust each other from the beginning.
So yeah. Tough problem. I don't have a solution.
But that said, networking makes it far easier. I've seen people be brought in even when an interview panel was meh, because they had worked with the hiring manager before (and to be fair they were fine, just bad at interviewing), as well as people bypass parts of the process due to their knowing people. And, certainly, people getting landing interview loops (and getting put in the front of the queue) all because of a referral/networking.
Even as a senior developer I used to get messages from Canadian recruiters asking me if I'd work for 18 dollars an hour. To this day I keep a screenshot to amuse me.
I like my privacy and I am not very social either. But I do like to connect with people and talk tech. Any tips how I could leverage the social media and blogging without really sharing much of my personal life? Am I looking at the wrong blogs for inspiration and ideas?
I don't think social media matters as much as being seen as someone who does things when you are in a real social situation. One handshake from an interesting person, like, say, Paul McMahon (who cofounded Doorkeeper and worked on Ruby) or Patio11, felt more important to me than 10k social media likes. (I purposely picked people who had nothing to do with my work career)
I don't know how applicable any of this is, especially with the invasion of nerd spaces by bullies. However, there are always people who need skilled coworkers, and finding sincere places to show these skills will always be helpful.
I guess here too quality matters over quantity. Publish less, network less but make sure its relevant and valuable.
With so much noise in the field currently, its hard to know if you too are part of it and finding the right platform/places to make sure you are providing value thats appreciated.
Set a reminder, once a week, to look at your LinkedIn. Ping someone you actually know, just to say hi. This keeps you fresh in their minds as someone who does X, and is still alive.
Finally, if you want to expand your network, just ask these same people if they know anyone else doing X and then send them a hello.
Very low-effort and direct contact is 100x more powerful than a blog post anyway!
One thing that I did, which I felt helped a lot, was running a board game group in Tokyo. It was not a minor endeavor in retrospect; I had to get a bigger apartment/house, I cooked, and I didn't charge money; I even paid for advertising on FB and Google. However, as a result, I met a lot of interesting people and met a lot of people from backgrounds normally wouldn't (IT of course, but media, manga/animation, caretaking, Soka Gakkai (!), politics, etc..)
However, I really did only do it to play board games, it wasn't a scheme to improve my work prospects. I didn't count the costs when doing it, since I considered them important to my mental health. This also created an organic way for me to get to know people from work better ("Hey, do you want to drop by and play some games with my friends?")
https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0...
Here us a synopsis: https://fs.blog/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people/
All the information is timeless. Most people just re-hash stuff from it and make it sound like it is new.
As for tech meetups, it’s admittedly been quite a while since I’ve gone to those, but in my past experience they were filled to the brim with entry level people with the same idea.
Set a reminder to check your contact list once a week.
Message someone on there you haven't talked to in a while.
Say something nice, hello, how are you, have you seen the latest tech news?
If you make this as easy and routine as brushing your teeth, you will very soon be overflowing with people who know and like you.
Kindness, consistency, and contact are all it takes.
Everyone’s journey is unique. :)
Now that's a totally useless sample size, but when I see people on here mention having sent hundreds of applications with no response, it just feels like I got super lucky somehow or they're doing something wrong.
I started growing a small network by doing some hobby programming during uni, being pretty good at it, joining communities and being active there, helping people with their problems, etc. Purely online connections with people I never met in real life, that others kept telling me are worthless. In the end getting those connections seems to have been the most important thing I've ever done, because they reached out to me when their companies were looking to hire.
A referral from the right person makes even old boundaries like being on the wrong continent meaningless. Just work remotely then, the company will figure something out... since you were recommended by someone they already trust, they're going to be far more willing to invest some extra resources.
Edit: and it's "critical jobs", some term that guy came up with, not all jobs.
Idiots.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-survey-reveals-85-all-job...
But most of them were McKinsey or Booz.
...which sucks for people trying to break into the field
Even in my own experience, I’ve had only one job as an adult that I didn’t have some sort of connection at or where my network wasn’t part of why I was recruited (so even if I didn’t know people hiring me personally, they knew of me). Now, my career has largely been in roles where I’m publicly visible (and that visibility is part of the job), so I won’t try to attach that to anyone else — but even for a non-public facing role, I would still leverage my network first and foremost I think.
I don’t think it’s so much that knowing someone guarantees you’ll get the job, but I do think it makes it much more likely you’ll get to the first or second stage of an interview.
Still, positions change. I've had to do full interview rounds after strong recommendations, and I've been hired by SMS in 10 minutes, salary negotiation included. One size doesn't it all.
I am no special snowflake but I keep my network strong.
Us engineers love complaining about the interview process, but then do NOTHING to display skill outside of a resume (and trust me, the amount of lying that happens in resumes is incredible).
There's definitely a balance to strike, some companies would rather bring on everyone and find out who sinks and who swims, others hate firing and will do virtually anything to avoid hiring someone who needs to be let go.
if it cost them a few thousand dollars to expand pool so they hire someone 20% better then that seems worth it.
Referred employees outperformed non-referred.
Not in cash terms. The recruiters/interviewers' salaries are "sunk costs" anyway.
My first job out of college was via someone I knew from a non-tech interest (friend of several of my friends who graduated earlier) and I soon discovered that while the cultural fit was good for that non-tech interest at that time, it wasn't for me professionally. It broke some connection with my friend group and my past.
I think I also like having a mental reset between jobs where I don't have to keep carrying the past with me, although maybe that will change next go around.
Related - also don't like telling people i got a new job for awhile in case it doesn't work out. Was very uncomfortable.
20 years recruiting tells me it’s not true.