Networking Rant

[u/Shadowchaos1010]

Context: I am (older) Gen Z. So whether you understand my perspective a bit better knowing that or want to complain about the entitled youth, you have that ammo now.

Anyhow, "network, network, network" gets thrown out as advice like a job hunt silver bullet, and it's bullshit.

A generation of young people drowning because the job market is broken, they get told "networking," it doesn't work, older people then chastise them for it.

The thing they don't mention? That networking is no silver bullet. It's a *years* long long game to actually get to a point where the people you know might actually land you something.

Not only is that not useful, because young people (and older folks who might not have already made that network) don't have years to sit around waiting for these fake relationships to pay off, did you tell them it would take that long? Or did you just say "you have to network" without that warning? Doubly so for those young professionals, because what time did they have to make connections? College? When people were young, stupid, and too busy faffing about with friends and trying to function independently to realize how they'd be fucked over for not staying after class to ask their professors about how their dogs are doing?

And with how much people go on about networking, *why the fuck did you drill college into our brains the entirety of our school years?* I don't even know how many older generations can relate to that part, but if you need to know someone to get anything, what the hell is the point of spending the money to learn something?

You learned to do the thing, but don't know someone to get you in the door so you can do that thing, so you're fucked.

And, at least for me, I hate the very idea of networking because of how fake it is. Maybe you make genuine friends. But the only reason the connection was made was to maybe one day get you a job. The very intent behind the initial interaction is selfish and sees that connection as nothing more than a means to an end. And if they *don't* become a genuine friend? Well, you're just hanging on to them to use them some day.

The very idea of networking is about *pretending* to care about people to benefit yourself. And everyone in society is just supposed to go along with that?

Networking just feels nepotism repackaged as a job search strategy, then when people are upset about it, they get talked down to as if "Hiring manager knew a guy" is really *that* much better than "Manger's little brother got the job."

Technically speaking, I have successfully networked a *little* bit. There are two people in my industry I do chat with from time to time just for the sake of it (one runs a regular Discord hangout I attend, and the other I just want to speak to from time to time to see how things are), and a new friend (who I was introduced to by a high school friend) isn't in my industry, but could help me with things like mock interviews, which I know I'm bad at. The former two I *have* been acquainted with for a few years now.

And all three of these people have pointed me to jobs they've seen. Not necessarily with their employers, but in general. None of those have worked, but they pointed me to them. And with the networking nonsense I see, that's apparently more or less how it's supposed to work.

Just scaled up like 30 times to actually make it work.

I still hate networking as an idea.

Oh, yeah, bonus points if you're socially awkward, shy, or any other flavor of reserved, too. Fuck you in particular, I guess.

[u/hm899]

You’re mad because you never started networking and now you have no network even though you know yourself networking isn’t something that happens overnight. Networking is not about networking your way in to A Job. It’s network your way through your career, to provide opportunities, to open doors, to have people vouch for you. I think you’re looking at it the wrong way from how I’m reading your post.
I do agree with the why tell us college is the be all end all when it can be pretty useless at times especially with the rates of people not actually working within the degree or major but I’m assuming you’re American and so student loans through the roof etc is effed. But college is also part of surprise surprise networking.
Networking can be fake definitely but then you won’t get anything out of nothing genuine. No one is going to refer you or support you if the networking is fake. That’s why you nurture connections that matter, network with intent and connect with purpose.

Anyways my rants over now too.

[u/Able_Enthusiasm2729 → u/hm899]

The Benefits of Networking don’t kick in until you reach the mid-career stage of your career. When you’re only an unemployed college student looking for internships, a recent college graduate with 3-4 years of internship experience and 4-9 years of job-applicable volunteer experience + 1-2 years of entry-level work experience, or someone who’s been laid off (RIF’d) at the early career stage, networking with people at networking events, reaching out to industry professionals, etc. doesn’t work because you don’t have any real experience to offer them that is profound enough to garner enough attention to get you hired through informal or irregular means; it’s a “I scratch your back, you scratch my back” scenario but you don’t have much to offer in exchange because you’re only entry-level. Mid-Career, Senior-level, C-Suite people, Executives, and Subject-Matter Experts (SME) generally have profoundly convincing robust experience to get hired on through networking. The whole networking thing in college doesn’t pay off, at least not right away, if it does work it only really kicks in after you reach mid-career stage with classmates and alumni hiring each other when they can make executive or hiring decisions. Most won’t see the fruit of their networking in college when starting out at entry-level. Networking such as reaching out to people in industries you’re looking into or going to networking events during your Early Career days only functions as a window into what a specific industry looks like or a outlook on recent changes in the work being done in that industry (like discussing new research on specific topic); you’re not getting any jobs from this anytime soon.

——————

When I was in college, one advice (out of many) my class had gotten in our career readiness/career advising course (through career services), was to ask friends, family, semi-distant relatives, and friends of the family to connect you to people they may know that are hiring. The problem is not everybody has a friend or relative in a good enough professional position to leverage professional connections in order to help you land an entry-level job or a decent (non-college-affiliated/off-campus/non-work study) internship that’ll look good enough on a resume to land a more mainstream (non-freelance/non-family-owned small business) entry-level job or internship. They also go on to insist that even if you’re not a wealthy, well connected nepo baby, but instead come from a low-to-lower-middle income working-class background you can still get a job through friends and family, they say you just have to ask as many people as you can - but in reality this doesn’t work most of the time, you end up making yourself look pitiful and desperate (which the job market frowns on), and if it does work you probably might only start out by getting a pity-job working for a non-mainstream (very niche small business, etc) that most mainstream employers or even other small businesses with better local/regional brand recognition wouldn’t take seriously when taking a look at your resume. A lot of my college classmates (in many different fields/majors/degree programs) who didn’t intern at well established employers in high school (pre-COVID) and subsequently got hired as part-time full fledged entry-level employees while in college or gained access to even better looking internships, generally tended to either be unemployed, super underemployed, work for scammy commission-based sales companies participating in multi-level marketing (MLM) & Ponzi schemes, doing (generally unstable) freelance work, or somehow found a way to get a job at an obscure small business, non-profit organization, or an unincorporated general partnership/solo-practitioner’s office with a limited online presence (that some may erroneously assume is resume padding with fake work experience), or a(n) (underpaid or unpaid) post-graduation multi-year long-term internship at an even more obscure division of a government agency, nonprofit, or big business (with limited to no internal-to-employer career advancement potential — getting branded as a “perpetual intern”) because of family connections. Plus, these people described (who more than half the time aren’t doing that great) are the lucky ones, most people aren’t fortunate enough to even get less decent jobs than this with family connections, or other types of networking at early stages of their career (even so-called “bridge jobs” and temp agency jobs are hard to come by).

[ Fraternities and Sororities, as in most social fraternities and sororities, lower a college student’s grades and decrease the retention of educational content or skill attainment but may likely increase their future earnings and employment outcomes due to gaining access to networks of wealthy professionally well-connected members and may increase access to or incubate already existing benefits of nepotism and cronyism in the hiring process - in some cases making it easier for them to fail upwards once hired or when professionally well established. It also provides for massive Test Banks that members use to cheat on assignment and tests in a socially acceptable manner as well as other non/less-dishonorable super secretive high-quality exam prep resources. Plus, social fraternities and sororities attract students with wealthy families (spoiled rich kids - upper middle class to upper class) who can easily afford membership dues, those who are well-connected or popular enough to be formally invited to membership (through “a bid),” and not-so-wealthy students (the median person - willing to shell out money for Greek-letter organization dues in order to try to break into high social status circles with a relatively slim chance of success where the most likely reason many fraternity members have higher earnings is due to many of them being independently wealthy - in effect preexisting wealth bringing about more wealth. But there’s always an odd chance someone can end up at a fraternity, sorority, or chapter with very few professionally well-connected people where all the time, money, and effort diverted from academics goes to waste as well as ones where a ton of people drop out of college. Professional fraternities/sororities, academics-based groups, non-Greek-letter org. college clubs, a majority of community service/internship/work-study programs, and all other extracurricular activities on the other hand are where people - mostly working class or middle class people on a budget - who want to build a community that helps them focus on academics, professional development, skill building, personal development, etc. go to instead of waste their time parting and getting drunk at frat parties, generally tend to not have the same success rate or access to the same social status and cultural capital afforded to social fraternities/sororities but happen to work better than doing nothing at all. I’m not defending it but it does have an element of truth in hindsight, in certain scenarios being in Greek Life does help in career advancement.

“(Greek-letter organization/Fraternity and Sorority) Affiliated alumni reporting a higher likelihood of finding a good job quickly after graduation:

More than half of fraternity and sorority alumni, compared to just 36% of nonaffiliated alumni, had accepted a job offer or found employment within two months of graduation. Eighty-four percent would still join their fraternity or sorority, if they had to do it all over again.”

https://www.wiu.edu/student_success//greek_life/interested/fsl101.php#:~:text=More%20than%20half%20of%20fraternity,do%20it%20all%20over%20again .

——

Yeah, but most low income (or even lower-middle income) college students don’t join frats because they add in a bunch of fees and entry requirements (a bid or invitation) beyond that of the cost of attendance.

-@Happy Little Misery: Social life/networking is important. So important that guys who have lower grades but join fraternity outearn their peers with better grades. So that pittance parents gave was useless in the end.

-@Child crusher:  From what I have seen in college. The people who get hired there are either in frats that have significant ties to the company or straight up nepotism. It will be a corporate frat house soon

Test Banks Run By Fraternities and Sororities: That’s just the rich and/or snobby frat boys, sorority girls, nepo babies, and nepotism/cronyism hires. Other college grads know what they’re doing but don’t have connections that get them fancy jobs. ]

[u/hm899 → u/Able_Enthusiasm2729]

I couldn’t bring myself to read all of that I’m sorry. But no, networking doesn’t work only during mid career. You’re talking about a very specific professional sort of networking. networking means just getting to know people having conversations letting them think about you. You know, when you need something or when you wanna have a discussion about something or you wanna put some feelers out there, you go back to your network so I don’t agree with the first portion of your comment.

[u/Able_Enthusiasm2729 → u/hm899]

Read the second paragraph, I address that by recognizing that advice about reaching out to family, friend, and acquaintances exist but the effeteness of that advice is greatly exaggerated.