The time LinkedIn got me a job

A little over a year ago, with college graduation looming I began my job-seeking efforts. I amassed all of my related work experience and managed to whittle my resume down to a single page. There's so much advice online regarding what to do to help land a job; one tip I read was to get it all down to a single page. It's ironic that, while the resume was necessary, its importance was dwarfed by a mouse click on a social networking site.

After my resume was crafted and sufficiently edited, I turned my attention to LinkedIn. I figured having a profile couldn't hurt, so I used my resume as a guide.

A month or two passed with me posting my resume to countless job sites and other company websites that caught my eye. I fielded more phone calls than I care to think about, for more jobs that I ultimately didn't want but went after out of fear. I distinctly remember pacing around the attic of the Virginia Ball Center, answering questions from an Amazon recruiter, thinking that this was the beginning of a crazy journey to the Pacific Northwest. That journey was not to be, much to my wife's relief. But the anxiety of not having a job and having to deal with the headhunters and the off-the-wall questions from interviewers was taxing. It took me a few weeks to disassociate my phone's ringtone with the panic of an impending interview.

Around March I received an email from a potential employer. The author introduced himself, and I later agreed to visit the company facilities for an interview. I loved what I saw, and things proceeded over the next few weeks, ultimately leading to a job offer and my acceptance of their offer. I later found out that the reason I was contacted originally was because I had clicked on the profile of one of their senior software developers; he had noticed that I'd looked at his profile and passed along my info. I was a bit confused, but when I looked a little more closely at my profile, I could see the number of people who had looked at my profile recently, a feature I had never noticed before:

Perhaps your LinkedIn viewcount is higher than mine; in that case, well, aren't you special.

Clicking on this number shows you the profile of those who've viewed your profile lately (at least it does sometimes - LinkedIn tries to hide some of them to entice you to pay for their premium account support).

I can't say that LinkedIn single-handedly landed me a job, but it certainly opened the door. For that, I give LinkedIn my thanks. The job-seeking game is not an enjoyable one for the college graduate, and utilizing connections and introductions through social networking feels more human than trying to game your way to the top of the recruiter's resume stack.