Why I’m Employed: Social Networking Sites and Google, the New Model for Finding a Job

Posted by: Daniel Dahlman, Branding & Social Media Assistant Jan 26, 2010 1 Comments

As the world’s financial institutions crumbled, unemployment skyrocketed, and the class of 2009 graduated in perfect sync, most of my friends and I let out deep sighs, swallowed our new and fragile feelings of adulthood, and moved back in with Mom and Dad. While home cooked meals and finding clean laundry on my bed were welcome improvements in lifestyle, the charms of living at home had completely worn off after several months of visiting employment agencies and blasting my resume into the black voids that are online job posting sites.

After a particularly rough day, during which I received a corporate postcard informing me that my BS in communication/advertising “didn’t match” what a large national book seller was “looking for” in their part time seasonal help, I decided that it was time to buckle down and reach out to anybody and everybody willing to help me find a job—from going on informational interviews to taking my dentist up on his offer to put me in touch with his residential properties-owning brother in Connecticut.

Two days after the postcard that made me question whether my education had any appreciable value at all, I found a sympathetic soul in one of my brother’s friends (shout out to Emily Lodish). After patiently listening to me describe the dark, winding, and barren journey that was my job search, she mentioned that her brother-in-law was Rock Creek Strategic Marketing principal Chris Lester and passed along his contact info.

In less than a second, Google had brought up Chris’s LinkedIn profile, led me to several of his posts on this very blog, and even showed me a Fox News clip of Chris’s analysis of last year’s Super Bowl spots. Armed with all this info with which to impress, I gave Chris a call. On his end, Chris already knew about my educational background and had even seen some of my work samples thanks to a Google/LinkedIn search of his own. With 95% of what we knew about each other coming from Google and the remaining 5% stemming from a five-minute phone call, Chris offered me an informal internship without ever having met me.

The crazy power of online networking pushed me closer toward employment on the first day of the actual internship. On my first day, the first person I was introduced to was Carla Briceno. Carla herself was beginning her first day in a strategic partnership with Rock Creek thanks to a relationship cultivated through social networks. Carla met Rock Creek principal and co-founder Scott Johnson through a mutual friend, they connected and stayed in touch via LinkedIn, and have since developed a business relationship that has recently brought them into the same office.

Two very different and tangled webs of online connections converged my first day in the office to put me in the same breathing space as the fireball that is Carla Briceno, who along with her husband, Jose Briceno, are the principals and founders of Bixal, a marketing and communication firm that specializes in the Hispanic and Latin American markets. It turns out that they were looking for someone with an interest in marketing who speaks Spanish, and hey would I be interested?

And just like that, I had a job. I never filled out an application. No one even checked my references; they checked Google. Thanks to the speed at which online networking can bring people together, I now intern at Rock Creek and work at Bixal, companies that I hadn’t even heard about two weeks ago.

Experiences like mine are becoming increasingly common. The popularity and ubiquity of sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter make it possible for people to connect in the marketplace, whether it be potential business partners, marketers and consumers, or employers and job seekers, many times before actually meeting. Social networking sites are rapidly replacing the Rolodex and business card and, as I recently learned, having immediate access to millions of people deep in cyberspace is a powerful thing.

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Daniel Dahlman

Branding & Social Media Assistant

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