Connecting in the 21st Century

Maybe I'm just crazy or am missing something along the way (which if you asked my wife she would say "what do you mean 'maybe'?) but even after roaming around the senior level career management space for more than 50 years, I still hear people (i.e. most) who are interested in making a change say they plan to "work with a recruiter" or use a job board and these are the major strategies that are going to get them to their career goals.

And I hear it so much that I wonder how the heck it is that most of us got to where we are? Indeed, when I'm talking to our members about stuff like this, especially when they are lamenting over the fact that they answer ads (i.e. postings) and never hear anything, or call recruiters and get no call backs, or generally don't understand why the world is not beating a path to their door, I often will ask them "tell me something, how did you get the job you have now or jobs that you have had in the past?" While I haven't kept score over the years, but my finger in the wind survey tells me that given the segment of the market we serve, at least 75% of the time, the answer comes back "oh, I got it through networking." "Someone referred me." For sure, that has been my experience in talking with members. The more senior the role, the higher the probability a job change will be driven by a series of connections.

As I said, I don't keep score when I'm on the phone or just talking with someone at a meeting, but we do keep score when we hear from members when they come back and tell us they have made a change, and have been keeping score for several years. Interestingly enough, the number turns out to be 70%, and interestingly enough, that number doesn't seem to change very much no matter what the economy is at the time, and we've been operating in this space for 30 years.

All that being said, we still can't deny that we live in an instant gratification society, and the more technology advances, one that on many levels becomes even less and less personal and requires more investment in hardware and software than in building real relationships. Heck, you look around a restaurant and sometimes it makes you feel like a smartphone the most important relationship people have.

This is in no way intended to be a rant against the "social networking space" indeed, there is no question that technology has made electronic connections easy and in many cases very productive in terms of seeking and getting information.

That said, it should be interesting as we continue to follow the evolution of "social networking" to see if and when it becomes the 21st century's version of "networking" as it relates to the care and feeding of careers as in people's willingness to put their personal reputations on the line.

Said differently, in my experience, "networking" is about a personal relationship of one person with another. Certainly, when it comes to referring someone to someone else, that carries with it a significant element of 'trust' and to my mind, a relationship where that level of trust is involved comes from a personal relationship built over time, because every time I refer someone to someone else, a piece of my reputation goes with it.

Am I just splitting hairs, or is there a difference between "social" and "personal"?