Rethinking Networking

Lately I’ve heard a lot of career services directors telling me how frustrated they are with their students. These directors pour time, energy and money into teaching their students how to network, a worthy effort. Entire campaigns are run on campus just to get the students on LinkedIn so that they can network. Despite all this investment, I haven’t found a single career center that can tell me they have a good percentage of their students even on LinkedIn, let alone actually networking on it.

Why is this? Networking doesn’t feel worth the effort. Career Sherpa sums it up nicely below:

“One reason job seekers get frustrated (and give up) is that it is difficult to see where these conversations and new relationships will lead. The end result of your conversations isn’t always evident. You can’t predict who will be able to introduce you to new people or opportunities. So, for people who are looking for tangible results, applying to jobs online checks the box and networking doesn’t.”

Networking for many people, maybe most, is a perfect example of a broken work-reward loop. There’s no tangible and predictable link between the work (networking) and the reward (a job). Is it surprising, then, that most students feel networking is a waste of time and effort? As long as students feel this way, they will never be effective networkers, no matter how much time, money, and software you throw at them.

Dringo rethinks networking by fixing this broken work-reward loop. We do this by linking the most typical networking reward, an actual job, with the people in the student’s already-existing alumni network who can help her get that job.

On Dringo, students can search jobs locally and across the country. Once a student finds and clicks on a job he wants, he can see the alumni he should network with to get that job, and he can reach out to these inside connections directly from the Dringo platform. The alumni attached to each job are ordered so that the best alumni connections are shown first.

Where do we get the jobs and how do we know these jobs are part of a specific alumni network? The jobs come from a job aggregator called LinkUp — over 3 million of them a day. How do we know which jobs are part of the alumni network? Participating universities upload their alumni database to their own private account. We use university records along with LinkedIn data to determine where all of the alumni currently work. Each alum in the database then becomes a “representative” of the company they work at. We only post jobs that have an alumni representative. See the diagram below. (If you would like a more detailed explanation of how we make this happen, please refer to our FAQ: How do we get jobs?)

Here’s a visual of the process:

(Note: Our process of matching alumni to jobs and prioritizing jobs based on the connection strength is too complex to cover in this brief article. If you’re interested in the technicalities, you can read our in-depth FAQ here: How do we match alumni to jobs?)

The result of all this crazy data analysis? No more work-reward problem. Dringo directly ties something your students want, a job, to specific alums in a position to help them get that job. This is networking students — and alumni — will do.

You might be thinking, “Oh, but what about all those jobs out there that aren’t on job boards? Those are the jobs you want! That’s why conventional networking is so important!” I’m not disputing that. I’m disputing the largely wasted effort of trying to pressure students into doing networking they simply will not do, because it is too hard and the payoff is too uncertain. Either way, when students and alums use Dringo they are networking, period. The connections they make on Dringo are connections they keep, connections that may lead to other career opportunities in the future that aren’t shown on job boards. As Career Sherpa says:

“Networking goes by many different names. Some call it connecting, chatting, sharing, learning, or meeting. Whatever you call it, networking is simply about building relationships and sharing information. Period. Every time you talk with someone, there is an element of networking involved.”

Dringo makes networking work for students. Dringo is networking students will do.