The average job-seeker takes 12 weeks to find work. TIME profiles one laid-off software architect who used social networks including Facebook and Twitter to land a job in just 11 days. Will the recovery favor the internet-savvy in other fields as well? (Or: maybe this guy was just a super employee who, if he hadn’t been wasting his time tweeting, would have found a job in 10 days?) [%comments]
The Digital Divide?
TAGS: employment, Technology
and 
. You can also watch it on 
What? The lesson here is that people with good networks get jobs more easily than those without. Whether you use Facebook and Twitter, a good rolodex, a church group, or pretty dresses and fancy parties to gather such a network is irrelevant.
@Bill Mill: Amen.
When I job-hopped recently, the *ONLY* thing that worked for me was a personal contact. LinkedIn helped a bit in getting his email details, but it wouldn’t have been the only means of doing so.
Also, this is usable only by someone who’s lost their job (for whatever reasons), and not someone looking to shift out. you wouldn’t want to “blast our information” to everyone on Twitter if you still want to have some degree of closeness between one job ending and the other beginning
No this goes back to what people have been saying for many years, its not _what_ you know, but _who_ you know. Knowing the right people, and having the right skill set doubly improves ones ability to beat the average.
In contrast, and to keep the average, I know another gentleman who has been without work for over a year while spending his time on the computer. However, since he has been in no hurry to find work – he spends his time playing games rather than being productive.
Having been in the IT industry for 14 years, I can say from personal experience *what* you know can get you a job, regardless of *who* you know. There are plenty of staffing agencies out there (I used to be a contractor for one of them) that if you have competence in a skill WILL find you a job and the skill doesn’t even have to be the current trendy flavor of the month. There are enough companies out there running legacy code that needs to be maintained that no competent IT worker should ever be unemployed. They may be underpaid but not unemployed.
I suspect that during good times, the advent of online connections has probably decreased the structural unemployment rate by several percent.
Assuming an average person is unemployed and job hunting every 5 years, and that there exists a job for them if they can find it, electronic boards, email, etc. reduce the time to find the job from (hypothetically) 8 weeks to 6 weeks. That reduces the structural unemployment from about 3% to 2.25% (8 / 260 weeks vs 6 / 260 weeks.)
This doesn’t help when you’ve got more workers than jobs, but will potentially make the differential more pronounced.
Being one who is being laid off at the end of September and starting out on my own, I can attest to the power of networking. What I find interesting is why so many “strangers” and peripheral acquaintances are so eager to help. The best I can come up with is 1) There is minimal work required by the referrer to pass along your info and 2) some sort of shared group identity with the acquaintance that creates an incentive to help the out of work person as a means of helping the group. Thoughts?
Moral of the story: Good networks help you land a job faster than average.
I think it is the nature of the network and his job that got him employment so fast. The network connects people in IT because they have to be on top of trends / communication methods and that person is a software architect who would be connected to that industry.
Now if he was a wooden pattern maker for the cast steel industry I bet he might have a much harder time getting a job via twitter.