Looking for a job? Start networking!

I’ve talked a lot about how technology affects our personal lives. But it revolutionizes how we interact in professional setting as well – from how we look for a job, to how we communicate on the job.

Technology is definitely a blessing for corporate America. It makes so many tasks easier and faster, saves a lot of time and money. From email and intranet, to virtual conference rooms, webcasting and screencasting.

We can have meetings with clients and colleagues from different offices around the world not leaving our desks.

We can train and get trained. I’m training an intern right now, for example, via email. I give him tasks, he sends them back completed, I review them and so on. With the number of questions that he asks me about every single small detail, I think all I’d be doing is answering them, if I had to do it in person.

Looking for a job is a whole new world as well. It seems like nobody cares about paper resumes and cover letters any more. We look for job offers online, we submit for them electronically and then we check out inboxes waiting for responses from potential employers. In many professions, like design, photography, videography, writing, candidates create entire websites as their resumes with work samples and links to their actual work online.

More than 70 million people on over 200 countries have their profiles on LinkedIn.com, including executives from all Fortune 500 companies. There is Monster.com, Careerbuilder.com, and many other online job search engines. Most of the companies have their job openings posed online.

To make a sense of how to use all that cacophony of work-related technology, I talked to Allison Hemming, a founder and president of The Hired Guns talent agency, author of “Work It!” and a career management expert who has been featured in The New York Times, The Today Show, The Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Newsday, CNN, CNBC, Good Morning America, NPR, PBS, Fortune Magazine and many other media outlets.

At first she agreed that technology has changed the rules of the job hunting and hiring game: “First, it has leveled the playing field - jobs that were previously only offered through headhunters are now accessible to everyone. LinkedIn has made it perfectly okay to have your profile (a stripped down resume+bio) out there 100% of the time for all the world to see. This means you can always be looking and people can always find you. Before LinkedIn job hunters had to sneak around.” She added: “Social media and blogs have allowed individuals to elevate themselves as experts (provided that they know what they're best in the world at and understand what their personal brands). I think we'll look back at this time and see it as tremendously creative and innovative.”

But then she dropped a real bomb - despite all that growth that online job hunting has enjoyed over the last decade: “The internet only accounts for 11% of all jobs landed. 80% of all jobs are actually landed through tried-and-true networking”.

No stop for a second, go back and look at it.

Only 11% of jobs landed are found online.

Now that it is staring me in the eyes, I realize that it’s true. Let me give you an example. My friends lost her job in apparel merchandizing last December, right before Christmas. Realizing that nothing was going to happen over the Holidays, she took a break and then literally chained herself to her computer for weeks looking for a job. She has been sending dozens of resumes a week. And all it resulted in was in her frustration.

After 3 months of doing that, out of hundreds of resumes that she sent out, she landed one job interview, for a position that turned out to be below her professional level. She landed two other interviews though networking with her ex-colleagues and ended up accepting an offer from an organization that she worked for before her last job.

So now why do we spend all this time working on our online profiles, surfing online job search engines, sending out resumes? According to Hemming 80% of people spend their time working the online job boards and only 10% networking.

What it leads to on the other end? Hemming describes: “Hiring managers are overwhelmed, because more people apply online than ever before, inboxes get stuffed with a lot of "noise" that isn't appropriate for the job at hand. In essence, your competition is spamming the hiring community making it harder for your great resume to get noticed”.

So what should we do? Allison puts is nice and short:

“People need to weight their time according to what's working”.