I wanted to follow-up on Dave’s article yesterday concerning the proper place for social networking tools in a job search.  He approached the topic from a candidate’s perspective.  Today, let’s look at it from a hiring manager / recruiter’s perspective.

A couple of months ago, I introduced you to Peter Weddle, a recruiting expert that I admire.  If you recall, Peter had some good insight concerning social networking tools in his bi-weekly newsletter that I thought was worth sharing.  For our current discussion, we’ll use LinkedIn as the example because it is the most common business social network.

As the name implies, social networking tools are supposed to assist recruiters and hiring managers to better network.  But, the reality is quite different:

“LinkedIn advertises itself as a networking tool for professionals.  That’s fine.  But building up a huge (or even a small) address book of contacts is not networking.  In fact, given that networking is actually a form of dialogue that is most appropriately practiced as an integral part of one’s business day, what’s going on at LinkedIn today is best described as ‘notworking.’ “

Actual networking has some very significant advantages, but it is a lot of work.  The struggle is that we want the benefits of true networking, without doing the work.  Peter puts it this way:

“Now, if you’ve ever been in a relationship, you know two things about them.  First, you quickly learn that they are hard work.  That’s why the word is spelled the way it is:  it’s netWORK, not net-get-around-to-it-whenever-you-feel-like-it.  And second, you come to appreciate that relationships take time to develop.  They don’t happen with the click of a mouse, whether you’re on LinkedIn or Facebook or any other social or professional ‘networking’ site.”

Tomorrow, we’ll talk more about how relationships are built and identify a “value equation” that makes them work over time.