Professional Networking - Mutual backslapping?

This is the third in a series of 5 articles. Last week we looked at the range of on-line tools available to candidates. This week, we focus on Professional Networking sites.

In addition to more general sites like Facebook, business networking sites such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, StumbleUpon and ZoomInfo are now being used in record numbers.

Linkedin is the site of choice for business professionals, with 23 million registered users worldwide and over 1 million here in the UK. Although not extensively used by employers in the UK as a source of candidate information, their use within the recruitment process is growing.

From a candidate perspective, the network offers two key benefits:

• It allows potential employers to reference you (informally) in terms of the quality of your contacts and the information on your pages. This referencing may only take the form of getting a better picture or perception of you as an individual, but it could sway the decision to interview one way or the other

• It allows candidates to legitimately 'be on the market'. With sites such as LinkedIn becoming the norm, you can now be found by alternative employers or head-hunters with relative ease. This should obviously increase the number of opportunities open to you, without the fallout of your boss finding your (traditional) CV on the market

But what does the use of professional networking really tell us? Does a large and impressive looking network prove anything other than someone uses the site exhaustively? If anyone suggested they had 1000's of Facebook friends, we wouldn’t consider that to be real proof of their popularity. A network of professional friends and ex-colleagues means that it is relatively easy to be recommended by a whole range of impressive sounding individuals, but does it prove that someone is really any good?

For the potential employer, access to all of this information may overcomplicate the recruitment process. When used properly by potential employees, networking sites expand upon skills and experience, give a greater insight into the way a candidate works and an idea of who they are associated with. When used improperly (or perhaps in a misguided way) they oversell experience and go on to prove that people will always be able to get their mates to 'recommend' them.


Next week we look what you can do as an employer to cut a sensible swathe through all of this technical noise or 'New Media Proves I'm Brilliant'.


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