Degrees of separation

Thing Seven: Professional and career networking

I have to disagree about so many points re LinkedIn.

First is the comment about the size of your connection pool. I have connections that have only a handful of connections, but I have other connections who have in the hundreds. LI is about networking and you want to network beyond your closest associates. You want that network of who you know and who they know so that you can find someone to advise you about something outside your ken. I do admit, if someone has over 500 connections they are most likely a headhunter. Even LI tops out the count at 500+ in their displays.

Second is the implication that LinkedIn is all about job hunting. Right now I would never expect to find an archival job through LI though I would use it to learn more about a potential employer or employee if I were on the hunt. I do agree that the career/professional aspects of LI are strong. My husband has used it twice to recruit for openings in his company. The second time he only used LI because the quality of the applicants was so much higher through LI than it had been through any of the other mainstream recruiting services. He still has to sift through a lot of resumes.

I do use LinkedIn to keep track of colleagues that I only see once or twice a year at conferences. Without LinkedIn it could be a few months to a year before I learned that someone has moved to a new job or is working on a fabulous project.

But for me it is also about connections beyond my usual cadre of archival suspects. I use LI to connect with the professional side of my friends, mostly in the software field, a very useful body of knowledge. And then there is my college alumnae networking, a great and supportive bunch of women, some of whom I knew then but many of whom I've met since. It is about discovering those degrees of separation. Actually, I found myself with a second degree of separation to the archivist at Fiskars not through any of my archivist connections but through a longtime friend in the software field who had grown up with someone who was connected with Fiskars dude. I haven't done anything with that connection, but it was a fun discovery. Use this network to find advisors or maybe even a speaker for an event. Those degrees of connectedness can be fascinating.

LinkedIn used to have an interesting news feed function based on your profile. In that I used to get headlines related to higher education and research as well as specifically about my institution. I don't know what happened to that. I found it very useful. Now I have some automated feeds from LI's Q&A feature. The Using LinkedIn category is sometimes useful. And when I was involved in planning an annual meeting I used the Event Planning Q&A to get ideas.

A recent upgrade to LI is the organizing that is possible on your connection list. It used to be simply an alpha list, but now I can tag them as colleague, classmate, friend, etc. Or I can sort them by company or location or industry. And the network statistics are interesting.

And finally, the image. That is a topic that has been hotly debated in the LinkedIn forums. You'll see my image is not of me. And several of my connections are the same way. The photo is the only place to personalize your profile be it with a face or just something to make a statement that doesn't come across elsewhere in your profile 'cause otherwise it is just a white page with black text and some blue and green highlights. The debate rages, but everyone agrees this is not the place for your drunken or risqué photos, go to Facebook for that. You don't see pets either though one of my connections did have a sheep for a while; I never did figure out what that meant, he was the least sheepish librarian I ever worked with.

P.S. There is currently an archivist job posted on LinkedIn! Unsurprisingly it is digital and corporate.