How Your Professional Relationships Will Save You in a Down Economy

Did you catch the post on Time.com about how important relationships become in a down economy? Josh Quittner reports that 30% of LinkedIn's revenue is coming from job seekers and professional recruiters. And that can only become more important as the bad economic trends continue. He wrote, "Job hunting [is] a good business these days as the economy sinks deeper into the tank and more people turn to their social networks to find jobs. In fact, job searches on LinkedIn increased 19% from August to September alone... With unemployment expected to reach double digits next year, you can expect those numbers to continue their sorry increase."

Great. But isn't this stating the obvious? Of course your Rolodex is an essential tool to finding a job independent of the sinking economy. And of course LinkedIn and Facebook and other social networking tools are adding applications which extend the basic Rolodex features making their services even more valuable, at least in theory. But isn't the more important question really, "HOW should I be using social networking tools to stay engaged with my professional network?"

We all know professional networking fanatics who are just naturally good at it. But what about the rest of us? What do the pros actually do and what works for them? What kind of payback do they actually get from their networking efforts? Would we expect the same return on a similar investment? Are they just working harder and longer than we do? Or are there tools and techniques that the rest of us aren't using to their fullest potential?

What do you think? How have you leveraged your network to find a job?