LinkedIn

Awhile back, I attended a networking event with a friend who didn't want to go alone. It wasn't in my field, but it was an opportunity to meet new people and eat free appetizers. Sometimes that's enough. I won a flash drive, on which I now have my resume and other ancillary documents. I met a bunch of new people and a couple of them sent me invitations to join LinkedIn. If you're not familiar with the site, it's a networking site, designed for professionals who are interested in connecting with others, whether corporate colleagues, others in their field or college classmates.

I'm not sure what the sites best value will be for me; I have connected with several people, some quite unintentionally. Everyone makes the occasional clicking mistake; rather than deleting an imported contact so I could send invites to a few people, I mis-clicked and invited everyone. Including people I have had minimal contact with and don't know at all; some of these people linked to me. I was surprised.

It's one of those sites that you can pay a premium for extra services, which makes the most sense for those who don't have gigantic debt like me, or who have their own businesses. You can click on someone you're linked to and see who they're linked to. That's right. The Kevin Bacon Game. I'm linked to a fairly low number of people, but because a few of my contacts have hundreds of links, I'm connected to over a hundred thousand people.

I'm linked to several people from that first happy hour, others with whom I used to work, college classmates, several attorney recruiters and other random people whose e-mail addressed were in my inbox. The greatest value I see on this site is the potential to get an introduction to a hiring manager of a company advertising on the site. Some jobs are linked to people at the third level; I get to them through one of my links and one of their links. One of the interesting features is that jobs at law firms show up for me; recently someone in Norway posted an attorney job. I think. The ad is in Norwegian.

My profile is incomplete; I see that it's 80% complete as I have yet to fill in several categories and have not uploaded a photo. My resume is in there with a couple of recommendations and there are a few others from whom I need to solicit recommendations. I have a lot of work to do and am optimistic that this will help me in networking.