Networking as a job or candidate searching tool is crap. Not only is it ineffective, it is dishonest. But I thought that Ragan had made it pretty clear that she wasn’t doing it for that. I do cold e-mails and cold calls all the time with professionals in my area or in my industry. Here’s a hint though, I am usually doing networking during times when we have lulls in hiring. If we are doing a bunch of hiring, I don’t have time to network because networking takes a ton of time. It is building a relationship. I rarely use my networks to poach from (like some seem to assume).  In fact, I’ve only hired a couple from my cold called/e-mailed/introduced network of people. But guess what, those network of people know other people and I get a ton of referrals from them.  And whenever I have a candidate that doesn’t fit with what our company does but does fit with another company, I hook them up.  I also give advice to these networked contacts and have developed friendships from it.

I use e-mail because I am on the phone all day and the people that I want to talk to are busy as well. I feel that e-mail is a courtesy and as long as it isn’t spam, I haven’t had any ill reaction to using it. Calling can interupt a person’s day and if they are busy, they might be more turned off by the fact that you called and interupted them.

The rude response is never okay though and it is irritating to me that some would justify such rudeness. Even if it was a straight recruiting e-mail, wouldn’t a simple “I’m not interested” work? Why be a jerk about it?

I’ll never get how people can be such jagoffs on the internet or over the phone yet be so normal if you ever meet them in person.