My latest post at Inside Higher Ed is on the topic of using social media in your post-academic job search. I don’t want to repeat what I wrote there, but I am going to give some excerpts (with permission-and with important details changed) from an email I received from grey, a regular commenter here who happens to be a client. Grey has been having a lot of success with LinkedIn and Facebook for her post-academic job search. She says:
My experiences with networking & social media … in the last 3 days!
I went through my resume and checked to see if anybody I worked with anywhere was on LinkedIn. Two people (both senior to me) from my tech days at [Big Time University] were, and they not only accepted my connections but immediately sent notes asking what I was up to, etc. (I wish I had done this *before* applying to work at the same company!).
I also looked up the companies I applied to or am applying to to see if I had connections. Turns out a friend from high school’s younger sister was at [Cool Company] for years; he and I are Facebook friends, so messaged him and asked him to put me in touch with his sister, and he said he would.
I found someone else through joining alumni groups at LinkedIn–my high school and college groups. I also discovered that my cousin turns out to have a couple friends from college at [Big Name Company], so I asked him if he would put us in touch.
Facebook has been really useful too. I learned from LinkedIn that a high school friend (my junior prom date, actually) has a job doing what I want to do. I sent him an email (and I got his email from being Facebook friends).
Another high school Facebook friend has been enormously generous. I had messaged him re: selling bike shoes & mentioned I was looking for work. He’s a director of [Doing Nifty Things], which is another way in to the kind of stuff I’m interested in. He immediately offered to do whatever he could – and has been unbelievably helpful – brainstorming ways I could come up with ways that would be valuable to hirers and offering strategies & reading my resume!
By the way – I heard back from my advisor and he’s putting me in touch with [So-and-So].
I also tried a cold email last week to [Wowza Company] in [my city] re: an info interview. The guy I emailed sent my address on to someone else who transitioned from a doctoral program to [that sector] – and he wrote me the friendliest email ever offering to chat about his experiences.
I’m also curious about what others are doing for money during the career search. I started a mini-business doing cleaning, errands, organization. But I’m curious about whether people have creative one-shot stuff.
Job hunting software: Brazen Careerist also has some comments about various software programs for job hunts – I’m following up on your suggestions to put something like this in place to track contacts.
This is fun! And, overall, people have been *enormously* responsive. The *only* thing I’ve sent out and not gotten a response on was a cold email to a radio producer at the local NPR station. But people have been SO generous and happy to talk.
How have you been using social media, dear readers? Do you have a LinkedIn profile yet? How have you leveraged Facebook? Are you networking with your fellow post-academics at the Leaving Academia Ning site? Are you following me on Twitter (sabinehikel)?
(P.S.: I like my social media to be very compartmentalized, so I only use Facebook for in-the-flesh friends and connections and LinkedIn for people I’ve worked with or am angling to work with, so if I turn down your request to connect, know that it is not at all personal. It’s just, as the kids say, how I roll).
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One of the reasons I left the academic life was my exhaustion with constant cross-country moves. One of the side effects of this is that I am now living in a city far from where I grew up. I like my life here and don’t intend on moving again, but it means that reconnecting with a “junior prom date” from Hometown is not very helpful when I’m looking for work in Newtown, three time zones away.
Now I do realize that “not very helpful” is not the same as “not helpful at all” — people know people all over the place, and who’s to say a junior prom date may not have connections in Newtown? (The laws of probability make that unlikely, but not impossible, I guess; it’s never happened to me.) The upshot is that I’ve found going through my LinkedIn connections pretty depressing. That’s not hyperbole — I actually find it depressing. My old friends are all very far away; even those who are eager to help can only help within a certain radius.
Given that enforced moving is one of the most consistently insane elements about the academic life — my friends in the corporate world are always horrified when they’re told how little control academics have over where they live — I don’t really think that trawling old alumni hangouts is as helpful for people like me as it was for your client. I’m an enthusiastic user of Facebook and always enjoy getting back in touch with old friends, but I think it’s a poor way to find business connections — at least if you don’t want to KEEP moving to wherever the jobs are. And that’s exactly what I left the academe to avoid.
All this is a roundabout way of saying I’d really like to see your blog address the side effects of constant moves — besides the obvious, that is. Even though I’ve been living in Newtown for five years now, I feel like I’m at a real disadvantage compared to Hometown and Newtown natives who stayed where they were. I feel like a lot of career advice is pitched toward people who’ve managed to build up 20 years of history in one place, and vanishingly few young academics or ex-academics have that luxury any more, if indeed they ever did.
Junior prom date did indeed have connections in Newtown. I think it depends on what kinds of things people do, and perhaps more particularly, whether you’re in an urban area. This contact from high school works for a major international corporation with many, many offices; one of which is located in my state.
I’ve been surprised at who knows people in various places – and in fact, entertained, to discover that people I went to college with, for example, ended up married to my cousin works with now. And that they met in Africa, not in either of their Hometowns or mine.
There’s no doubt a disadvantage as compared to people who know a place inside-out because they’ve been there for 20 years. At the same, there’s an advantage to having moved frequently as you end up knowing at least a few people … who then know people … all over the place. If you haven’t tried something like LinkedIn, you might be surprised at the variety of people your old friends know.