Job Networking Goes Virtual

By Christy Rogers , Senior Research Associate at Kirwan Institute

Recently, a friend mentioned that he got a new job through LinkedIn, and then built his entire sales team by posting a job notice on Facebook. No sheets of paper were ever exchanged. No print ads. No phone calls. He’s not alone. As a recent CNN article “I Found My Job on Twitter” notes, social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace are increasingly used to post and fill job notices. As my friend said happily, “it’s perfect – essentially, everyone is a friend or referred by a friend.”

The old saying used to be, “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” Today, it’s not just who you know, but how you know them. If this trend continues, it makes job hunting easier for those of us with computer access, gadgets, and the knowledge and time to use them. But for the millions of people who don’t, the “digital divide” may only get wider. People with disabilities are about half as likely to have internet access as those who do not. Rural access is improving, but still lags behind. Two-parent households are twice as likely to have access as single-family households. Nationally, Blacks and Latinos are roughly half as likely to have internet access as the national average, and about as third as likely to have access as Asian Americans. The US Department of Commerce ran estimates of what internet access rates for Black and Hispanic households would have been if they had incomes and education levels as high as the nation as a whole, and found that these two factors account for only one half of the difference. How do we make up that other half of the difference? Well, my guess is it’s about the cultural and social networks that start on the ground – in our neighborhoods, in school, at work – about being friends, or friends of friends. And those arenas are still largely segregated by race and class. Until we do better at making a wide variety of friends in the “real world,” we’re not going to do any better in the virtual one.

Link to CNN article:
http://money.cnn.com/2009/05/12/news/economy/social_networking_jobs/index.htm

Link to 2000 Dept. of Commerce Digital Divide report
http://search.ntia.doc.gov/pdf/fttn00.pdf