Aren’t the social media wonderful? With LinkedIn you should never have to attend a boring association meeting and eat ill-treated chicken again. You won’t have to email resumes. You will be discovered by all the HR people looking for talent. Not so fast. While LinkedIn is a marvel, it’s no substitute for meeting people in person if you are changing careers or trying to meet older managers who might hire you. Also, I have never met a successful strategy that involved waiting — or anything or anyone.
Not everyone’s LinkedIn profile is a great selling tool. Suppose you don’t have the building-leaping experiences that instantly impress? Suppose the experience you’re selling is old — not obsolete, just several years back. Or, you look unattractively “thin” because your experience is in a different field. Are you doomed? Not if you meet people and tell your story, a.k.a. network.
Many senior execs are active in trade associations but don’t use LinkedIn. Someone else wrote the profile and monitors the activity. You might sit next to your target at an association meeting but be ignored electronically.
HR people reading your profile won’t be impressed because none of your charisma comes through. Only face-to-face meetings allow you to project what’s special about you.
Of course you need a LinkedIn profile and it’s great for locating people to meet or influence. However, job hunters need an arsenal, not one bullet. Relying on one technique, however useful, lengthens the time it takes to get results. Before you stop paying your association dues and rely solely on on-line job hunting you may want to talk with your most tech savvy friends. Are they really using only LinkedIn for job hunting? If so, how much time has elapsed since they started a job hunt?
We asked clients who’d gotten jobs within six months and they all told the same story: They used as many different tools as they knew of and searched for more. They never missed an in-person meeting. They got results.