@meetar Ministry gig-getting functions almost identically to med school residency match; I've heard similar things about some academic hires. Not sure where that stuff fits here, but we may not be who you're speaking to.

We're only an hour in, but I'm surprised "job board" is as high as it is. I'd be curious to know if that rate has changed over the last 5 years. There are 100 more follow-up polls I could post, but I'll leave that opportunity for others :)

@meetar literally ALL of my jobs have been referrals by family, friends, and former coworkers.

@meetar @kissane Kind of a mix of cold email / job board: I got my current job through hired.com where you list your skills and company recruiters (not agencies) message you to see if you’re interested. I really liked it over everything else I’ve tried.

@meetar They hit me up on LI

@meetar LinkedIn message counts as cold email, right?

@meetar Saw job ad on birdsite posted by an acquaintance, applied, got — so Referral / Network was what I picked

@meetar this is so interesting, I've only ever gotten jobs by just applying places

@meetar I got my latest (part time, delightful) job from basically emailing the person in charge of the VERY small workplace and saying "I've always wanted to work here, here's what I can do..." and then, later, when there was funding, she reached back to me. We're both old internet people so maybe it was "through a friend" but had never worked together before. It's been great!

@meetar Last one was via folks who knew folks; but the one before that I literally scrobbled off LinkedIn scrolling and happened to hit a good note with the hiring manager.

@meetar They had a demo night to show off their new software. I was the only person who came with copies of my resume. All the younger people there went “man, why didn’t I think of that?”

The results are in: 2/3 of respondants got their last job via referrals, which supports my confirmation bias. Not quite 20% through job boards, which is a bit higher than I'd guessed, and only slightly more than cold contacts.

Now I'm wondering whether there's any way to make a job board act more like a human network. I don't think it's 2000 people applying for a single position via a web form, to be processed by machine learning.