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The magic of social networking: How to get a job thanks to the contacts owned?
I have actually written this article by chance: searching for materials on Legal Process Outsourcing, I have met Total Attorneys, a legal service provider. Their recruitment strategy, based on activity in social networking media, seemed to be very interesting to me…
Total Attorneys is a company employing 215 professionals in Chicago and 12 professionals in India. Ed Scanlon, their founder, uses a very interesting recruitment strategy: his employees are people who have many contacts on social networking platforms, as Twitter, Ning, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn and other. According to him, such people can deliver new, valuable employees and ideas to the company. Is it the only reason for their recruiting?
LinkedIn has about 39 million users in 200 countries world-wide. Each second a new member joins the LinkedIn community, which shows a dynamic growth of this platform. And Facebook has 200 million(!) registered users – that would be a population of a bigger country, wouldn’t it?
No wonder that the founders of these platforms belong to the richest people in the world. Let’s take an example: sales revenues of Facebook for the fiscal year 2008 amounted to US$ 300 million. This company does not even employ 1000 people! And their business “adventure” has begun very modest – at the beginning of 2004 Mark Zuckerberg, a student from the Harvard University, established together with a few friends a social networking website to offer their users the possibility to search for old contacts and share messages and pictures with other people. They created a complete source code within 2 weeks. The membership was originally restricted to the students of Harvard, however, as the platform reached high popularity among the students, they decided to expand to other universities.
In summer 2004 Zuckerberg and his friends moved to Palo Alto, California, where they rented a small house being their first office.
After just 3 years, in 2007, the press announced that Microsoft bought 1,6 per cent of Facebook shares, paying US$ 240 million for them. The estimated value of Facebook amounts to US$ 15 billion.
Many researchers (as Edelman Trust Barometer for instance) show that today’s consumers are more likely to trust other people than companies, experts or universities and other institutions. While in 2003 20 per cent of respondents placed their trust in “a person like me”, today that percentage has grown to 68 per cent.
Social networking platforms can be compared to (huge) banquets: people drink cocktails, get in touch with each other, make small talk, but they do not buy any products or services. But: if you want to buy something, you often ask your friends to advise you. And that is the point being the essence of the social networking platforms: thanks to interpersonal contacts a big market for products and services is being established. And – as we can assume – the more contacts a person has, the more attractive he/she is on the labour market (and on other markets, too – think about BPO/KPO/LPO market for instance).
More and more business people are conscious about that. That, what was good yesterday, is not sufficient any more and will for sure not be sufficient to meet the challenges of tomorrow. Companies learning from research findings similar to the above mentioned, are preparing strategies for the upcoming years. They see the growing role of social networking media, supplementing the traditional banquets (however, the last ones have not disappeared – yet?).
And probably for that reason networkers are as demanded in the company owned by Scanlon – they are in fact much more worth, than their annual income.
I thought, that would be the end of this story. However, I have mistaken. Have I told you that social networking is magic, haven’t I? Well, it really is.
I wanted more people to read this article and I have posted a link on Twitter. What am I seeing today?:
Do you recognize him? Yes, that is Ed Scanlan, founder of Total Attorneys. I will log in on my Twitter account soon to say “Hallo” to him…
Magdalena Szarafin
http://www.szarafin.info
Download as a *.pdf file from here:
The magic of social networking: How to get a job thanks to the cont...
Total Attorneys is a company employing 215 professionals in Chicago and 12 professionals in India. Ed Scanlon, their founder, uses a very interesting recruitment strategy: his employees are people who have many contacts on social networking platforms, as Twitter, Ning, Facebook, Bebo, LinkedIn and other. According to him, such people can deliver new, valuable employees and ideas to the company. Is it the only reason for their recruiting?
LinkedIn has about 39 million users in 200 countries world-wide. Each second a new member joins the LinkedIn community, which shows a dynamic growth of this platform. And Facebook has 200 million(!) registered users – that would be a population of a bigger country, wouldn’t it?
No wonder that the founders of these platforms belong to the richest people in the world. Let’s take an example: sales revenues of Facebook for the fiscal year 2008 amounted to US$ 300 million. This company does not even employ 1000 people! And their business “adventure” has begun very modest – at the beginning of 2004 Mark Zuckerberg, a student from the Harvard University, established together with a few friends a social networking website to offer their users the possibility to search for old contacts and share messages and pictures with other people. They created a complete source code within 2 weeks. The membership was originally restricted to the students of Harvard, however, as the platform reached high popularity among the students, they decided to expand to other universities.
In summer 2004 Zuckerberg and his friends moved to Palo Alto, California, where they rented a small house being their first office.
After just 3 years, in 2007, the press announced that Microsoft bought 1,6 per cent of Facebook shares, paying US$ 240 million for them. The estimated value of Facebook amounts to US$ 15 billion.
Many researchers (as Edelman Trust Barometer for instance) show that today’s consumers are more likely to trust other people than companies, experts or universities and other institutions. While in 2003 20 per cent of respondents placed their trust in “a person like me”, today that percentage has grown to 68 per cent.
Social networking platforms can be compared to (huge) banquets: people drink cocktails, get in touch with each other, make small talk, but they do not buy any products or services. But: if you want to buy something, you often ask your friends to advise you. And that is the point being the essence of the social networking platforms: thanks to interpersonal contacts a big market for products and services is being established. And – as we can assume – the more contacts a person has, the more attractive he/she is on the labour market (and on other markets, too – think about BPO/KPO/LPO market for instance).
More and more business people are conscious about that. That, what was good yesterday, is not sufficient any more and will for sure not be sufficient to meet the challenges of tomorrow. Companies learning from research findings similar to the above mentioned, are preparing strategies for the upcoming years. They see the growing role of social networking media, supplementing the traditional banquets (however, the last ones have not disappeared – yet?).
And probably for that reason networkers are as demanded in the company owned by Scanlon – they are in fact much more worth, than their annual income.
I thought, that would be the end of this story. However, I have mistaken. Have I told you that social networking is magic, haven’t I? Well, it really is.
I wanted more people to read this article and I have posted a link on Twitter. What am I seeing today?:
Do you recognize him? Yes, that is Ed Scanlan, founder of Total Attorneys. I will log in on my Twitter account soon to say “Hallo” to him…
Magdalena Szarafin
http://www.szarafin.info
Download as a *.pdf file from here:
The magic of social networking: How to get a job thanks to the cont...
Tags: bebo, facebook, legal process outsourcing, linkedin, lpo, magdalena szarafin, mark zuckerberg, microsoft, ning, social networking
Comment
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Comment by Rahul Singh on November 26, 2009 at 4:57am -
Hi dear Magda,
Really a very interesting post.
Thanks
Ragards
Rahul
director@thearchersgroup.com
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