I’ll be honest – finding work on the internet only ever works if you have specific skills and know where to go online to sell them. I sell my own work every day on the web, but that’s because I know how to search for places in which to sell it (thank you Google) and because my product (words) is something that finds a natural home on the web. Using the internet and its associated technologies can be extremely useful for finding jobs (like mine) – but you have to know how to apply that technology.
The connections that internet providers are now making available are powering a whole new way of using the internet, where multiple platforms and applications don’t just run side by side but bleed into each other (think about commenting on a programme that is still being broadcast, on your digital TV but also on your Facebook page). Social media technology, which doesn’t work without those high speeds and big bandwidths backing it up, has started to change the face of job finding for good. So maybe my own experience (when I used to look for work on the web, before I started selling my services as a writer, I’d sign up for all sorts of online agencies and never hear back from them again) is out of line with modern times.
The basic problem I (and all my friends) used to have was that any job site we used was also used by pretty much everyone else in the universe. So there’d end up being millions of potential candidates for any job and we’d never see an interview. In that respect we were like a web site that is trying to optimise for a really widely used search term – competing with so many other sites that it will never see the light of the first two pages on the SERPs.
Modern net technology has moved away from that blanket approach – everything that happens online these days is small scale. That’s the whole point of social networking, which is now driving everything that happens online. Social networking is all about exclusivity – while the old net model was a false impression of inclusiveness, so inclusive that no one stood a chance. Social networking makes you define a network of contacts and work within it – and that’s a much more fruitful way of getting work.
Internet providers, as I have said already, are making this happen with the increased speed and power of their signals and connections. The more technology that develops from the exclusive social network model (you’ll have seen a lot of it already, like Google’s plus one and the Facebook “like”), the more power our internet connections will need to run the sites we use, and to allow us to fully engage with that tech.
Finding work online is all about getting a network together and using it to recommend you (a recommendation is exactly like a plus one or a like) to potential clients. That’s becoming more and more possible as the power of our net connections spirals into its next level. Look to your internet providers for the tools to join the revolution.