Is Networking as a Tech Recruiter Career-Must or Overrated?

Networking is a useful skill just ask recruiters about how it has helped them land some of their best hires and they will have enough evidence to support their claim. It is considered to be the ‘holy-grail of recruitment’. On the contrary, another set of recruiters squirm upon hearing the term and find it quite aggressive and ‘so-not-their-style’.

How can there be two contradictory beliefs about networking amongst the recruitment space? This has forced us to dive into an important question – is networking as a recruiter a career-must or over-rated? We explore the popular ways of networking, why it is the way of life for some recruiters and why some of them find it simply overrated.

Is Networking as a Tech Recruiter a Career Must or Over-rated?

In order to truly reach a meaningful conclusion that covers every aspect of networking without any bias, we have listed out the two belief systems separately and then tried to zero down on what makes more sense – pro-networking or no networking!

Networking as a Tech-recruiter is a Career Must:

A recent research conducted by ACA Research in January 2021 revealed that more than 75% of Indian professionals are considering changing their jobs and about 38% of them are looking forward to attending networking events to land their next professional stint. So why should recruiters flock to such offline/online events to hire deserving candidates from the landmine of talent that is available? And connect with the other tech recruiters while doing so?

Here are some tried and tested networking strategies that present a strong case in favour of building a strong professional network as a tech recruiter:

LinkedIn:

There should be two types of personas that should form a part of your network, people who are considered potential candidates and people who can help you reach those candidates. A good way to start doing that is by being active on LinkedIn and creating meaningful content around topics that talk about your company.

This will generate interest regarding your organisation amongst your readers.

It also helps connect with other tech recruiters active on LinkedIn and stay on the radar by actively participating in conversations and ideas being shared there. This will not only help you but also get you noticed as a fellow tech recruiter, especially if you have sensible points to add and bring fresh ideas to the table. You might land your next hire by simply being active on LinkedIn, for example a tech recruiter passes on a potential candidate that matches your criteria and is actively looking for a job. This could happen because you often engaged in meaningful conversations with them through posts.

In fact, some compelling statistics by LinkedIn are listed out on their platform, that can help a tech recruiter realise its importance.

• 45 million people use LinkedIn to search for jobs each week.
• 4 people get hired every minute on LinkedIn.

Attend Industry Events:

One of the best ways to expand your professional network is to attend seminars, conferences and other such events that have panels of esteemed professionals talking and discussing important trends covering your industry and sector. It is an amazing opportunity to engage in conversations with like-minded people and create potential candidate pipelines in the process.

Other than attending popular industry events, a step ahead for a tech recruiter would be to organise a recruiting event to showcase the different open positions with their company. A lot of companies today are conducting recruitment events by stepping away from the traditional ‘job fairs’ and experimenting with many creative and interesting ways of enticing potential candidates to work with them. These can be in the form of hackathons, weekend retreats, expos, conferences etc.

Networking as a Tech-recruiter is Overrated:

Many recruiters are trying to look at the other end of the telescope and discovering that networking is overrated sometimes. Here is a list of where this idea clearly resonates with them:

Networking Without Doing any Important Work:

Networking can work wonders, provided it is done in a way that reaps the desired benefits. This set of recruiters believe that simply swapping business cards and adding LinkedIn contacts is good to grow your network on paper, but may add little value in reality.

What really matters in a professional network is who knows you, but the catch is to understand that people will know you only against your competence or your achievements.

For example, a company trying to attract top talent will have a hard time doing so if they have not invested enough in educating potential hires about what they do, how they do it, how they are adding value, etc. An organisation needs to actively invest in its social media presence, PR activities, growth initiatives in terms of the products and services that they offer and most importantly build and sustain a good pool of paying clients, in order to attract top talent to handle the reins of their work and keep the ship sailing.

The recruiters who find networking overrated because they believe that building a powerful network doesn’t require you to be an expert at networking.

Therefore, developing credibility first is much more valuable, which, if done right, will automatically build a worthy professional network later.

Networking Appears Phoney:

The basic trick to network is being genuinely interested in someone professionally, without appearing that you are networking.

However, most people indulge in networking with an expectation in mind and they network just to build a network, which can come across as phoney. People will find themselves counting the mound of business cards they collected at an event, without being able to remember a single conversation with a prospect.

This is when networking appears to be overrated. It becomes a practice wherein you spend time tugging at the sleeves of important people, without any long-term benefit or real value coming out of it.

Networking – The Means to an End

The Covid-19 resultant ‘Great Resignation’ is only going to get worse, with 55% of professionals believing that employee turnover will increase in 2022; as per a recent survey conducted by Korn Ferry based on input from talent acquisition experts from across the globe.

This illustrates the need to build a strong professional network, to be able to have a strong set of connections to approach, and talk positively about your employer’s brand when times get pressing.

Having presented both the cases above, recruitment is still a people’s business at heart and therefore, human networking forms an essential skill or trait that every tech recruiter must develop, so that it can increase your credibility as a tech recruiter.