Job sites stress 'insider' angle

Social networking sites for job-seekers are popping up all over the Web. With names like LinkedIn, Ryze, Spoke Software, and Tribe Networks, the sites boast the opportunity to link users to ''insiders" with access to jobs, eliminating anxiety-ridden cold calls.

Charlene ''Charlie" Lieu said the concept worked for her. Lieu, 30, landed a job at Genstruct, a small biotechnology firm in Cambridge, after the company's president and chief executive, Keith O. Elliston, spotted information about her on LinkedIn.

Lieu, who will receive master's degrees in engineering and business from MIT next month, said Novartis had already made her an offer when Elliston contacted her. Lieu accepted Elliston's offer because she wanted to work for a small firm.

''I had never thought of doing a job search online," said Lieu. ''I really signed onto LinkedIn as part of my MBA class at MIT. At the time, I had only 10 links, but through those 10 links the CEO of the company I work for found me and asked if I would consider the firm."

The theory behind social networking sites is that users become links in a chain with only a few degrees of separation. Lieu, for example, was separated from her new boss by only four people, or four degrees. In that sense, LinkedIn and its competitors are making use of the so-called small-world theory.

In 1967, Harvard University social psychologist Stanley Milgram tested the theory when he sent 300 letters to randomly selected people in Nebraska and asked them to use their personal contacts to reach an individual they did not know in Boston.

In all, 60 senders contacted the Boston individual through other people, leading Milgram to surmise that the average number of steps separating individuals in the United States is six. That led to the popular phrase ''six degrees of separation."

Some consummate networkers have added their names and personal contacts to social networking sites, but that doesn't mean they aren't cautious or skeptical. The reason: Social networking isn't foolproof.

Diane Darling, president of Effective Networking Inc., a Boston consulting firm that teaches clients the value of networking, prefers face-to-face contact, but she has posted her name and shares business contacts on social networking sites like LinkedIn.

Darling said job-seekers should be aware that social networking can create a false sense of intimacy. For example, when she placed a note on the online bulletin board craigslist.com indicating that she was looking for a bookkeeper, she received some unusual responses from people who didn't seem to understand that they were connecting with a potential employer.

One job applicant said: ''This job is perfect for me because I just had a child." Another said she was very organized to ''the point of having obsessive compulsive disorder" -- information most people wouldn't divulge in an interview.

''Relationships do not always transfer," said Darling. ''Sometimes they do, but it takes more than the fact that you and I know each other to get hired. And just because we might have friends in common does not mean that I will want to hire you or even like you. So, the downside is when you depend too much on technology and forget that you really have to meet people face-to-face."

Phillip Lee, chief executive of PHT Corp. in Charlestown, organizes and hosts meetings in Boston for a site called Ecademy, an online social networking site whose members hold face-to-face networking meetings. Lee, whose company sells electronic diaries to pharmaceutical firms that want to manage clinical trials, said he started using social networking sites a few years ago to find potential customers. ''Ecademy requires that the person you contact must accept your message," said Lee. ''If they do not know you, they might not accept it. But there is the ability to be introduced through other people. So, people act as conduits."

Lee described Ecademy as a site where ''you join and you can also network with people and do searches. You can find people who work for IBM or Novartis, for example, and those people also share information with others."

Still, Lee says, ''face-to-face meetings are important."

''Once you meet them, it is easier to recommend your contacts," he said. ''So after people meet on line, we have them meet face-to-face in a group and then they meet one-to-one if they want to. Our groups have 20 to 25 people who have a special connection, such as working in the same industry. Meetings are all about strengthening the connection."

Lee, who also joined LinkedIn, is linked to thousands of contacts on that site, which describes itself as a networking tool that helps members unearth inside connections to executives, industry experts, hiring managers, or business partners. Professionals who rely on the site can access a feature called LinkedIn Jobs, a network that lets ''job seekers search job listings and discover inside connections to hiring managers or human resource professionals," the sites says. LinkedIn is currently being used by more than 2.6 million people, including users in Europe and Asia.

Still, skeptics can't help wondering how safe the sites are. Chris Hoofnagle, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said users should proceed with caution. ''Lots of people are engaging in this networking behavior and do not know that there are companies that scrape these sites for information. They save the information to sell to strangers."

His group is lobbying for stricter laws.

''If the goal is to engage in networking, then there should be rules that say the information can only be used for certain purposes and that it must be destroyed after a certain amount of time, such as when you actually get that job," he said.

Diane E. Lewis can be reached at dlewis@globe.com.