A decade ago, John Battelle stressed the importance of “search literacy.” What he meant was that people who were skilled at using Google to find information had an edge over those who had yet to acquire this aptitude. In the Information Age, if you couldn’t make sense of an increasingly information-rich world through effective search capabilities, you’d be culturally marginalized, just like a person who couldn’t read street signs.
Now, those who can conceptualize and understand networks – both online and off – have an edge in today’s fast-paced and hyper-competitive landscape, where the speed with which we can make informed decisions is critical. To wit, the subtitle of my forthcoming book is “Managing Talent in the Networked Age” — I think the networked age changes everything.
I could probably look up who in the world John Battelle is yet it would feel like giving in. This is a jargon-stuffed plug for a book yet it’s worth a skim because its central point is good. It is true that you don’t get work through job ads so much anymore. So many people apply for everything that it’s become a game instead of a strategy. And if all Hoffman’s article boils down to is “it’s who you know”, he has a point. Getting out there, making yourself known by doing something useful and meeting people along the way, it works.
And it’s a lot more fun meeting people than it is filling out online CVs that are only going to be read by software algorithms.
Via 99U