Abridged: Dennis Publishing, from The Career News, Aug. 5, 2008, V8, #31

NEW YORK, NY — Social networking sites will increase in importance as a job search tool, but they’ll still lag behind online job boards and in-person networking, a recruitment firm has predicted. In a recent survey of 500 working executives by Harvey Nash, nine out of ten said they had signed up to a site such as LinkedIn, while 50% had put their CV on an online job board.

While the execs expected the importance of online networking to grow from 24% now to 38% in two years’ time, that’s still less important than developing personal contacts (81%), contacting recruiters (63%) or using job boards (51%). Some 93% of the senior executives surveyed said putting time into developing their ‘personal brand’ was a wise career move. While some three-quarters said this was best done offline, two-thirds said they do use social networking sites to look good.

Commenting on the findings, Carol Rosati, director at Harvey Nash, said: “While online networking does not replace human interaction, it does provide candidates with an additional set of resources to create and maintain a personal brand and complement the profile they build through ‘real world’ networking.” The top social networking sites for senior execs looking for career progression were LinkedIn (57%), Plaxo (16%), and Facebook took just 6% of the vote.

Category: Career · Corporate Employment