All honesty here, we are not well informed on the entire social networking side of the web. We’re just starting to use Digg and del.icio.us so our knowledge is limited. But this CareerJournal story is loaded with foreshadowing.
Getting the Scoop On a Future Boss discusses the changes occurring in the social networking field by allowing job seekers to connect with existing employees at a company.
From the author:
Until recently, social networking on the Web was confined to hubs for young people seeking to meet and chat. Now, there is growing interest in adapting social networking to the business world — both among networking sites looking to expand their reach and among job sites seeking to offer new services. One result: People who are searching for work have more one-stop shops for making connections, getting referrals from employees, and finding out the inside scoop.
Companies will have to monitor what is being discussed in the public forum which is quite doable today. I don’t have a feel for how many smaller companies are alerted to this new phenomenon, but they will need to devise some plan for monitoring it.
The downside:
For job seekers, reading online posts can lead to misimpressions. People tend to complain more than compliment. And what they post may not necessarily be true. On one online job board, a user complains that “there is no work-life balance” at a particular accounting firm. Another user criticizes the interview process for a marketing job, protesting that the company is “very, very inconsiderate to your time.” Elsewhere, one worker writes, as part of a job description: “Collect owed tax money from the poor american souls in the Self-Employed/Small Business Area.”