This is an excerpt from Peter Weddle's article, "Three Job Market Fictions"...
Fiction #2: The best place to find a job is on a social networking site.
The conventional wisdom is that social networking sites are now the single best way to find a new or better job. According to pundits, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter have eclipsed if not replaced job boards, traditional face-to-face networking, print publications and career fairs as viable job search resources.
While such hyperbole gets media attention, it is a misinterpretation to think that these sites are all you need to find a job. Social networking is indeed a valuable job search tactic, but it is not the sole technique for conducting a job search or even the most effective. Indeed, for every person who has successfully found a job on a social media site, there are literally hundreds of others who have found employment using other tools.
In my 2010 Source of Employment survey, for example, we had almost 1900 people tell us that the single best way to find a job was by using a job board. Answering a job posting or archiving a resume on such a site was selected by over 28 percent of the respondents. The second highest response was a tip from a friend at 9.6 percent, followed by a newspaper ad at 8.4 percent, a call from a headhunter at 7.1 percent and a referral by an employee of the company at 6.4 percent.
Does that mean you should ignore social media sites? Absolutely not. But, take the chatter about the power of these sites with a grain of salt and use all of the tools at your disposal. Today's job market is the toughest in years, and you simply don't know which resource will end up working best for you. The key to success, therefore, is to play the odds and use every single one of them.
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Since 1996, WEDDLE's has conducted ground-breaking surveys of recruiters, job seekers and Web-sites providing employment-related services on the Internet. Its findings and other research have been cited in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, Money, Fortune, and Inc. magazines and on national television and radio shows, including CBS This Morning, The Today Show and Bloomberg Financial News.