Graduation is near for many of the nation’s college students.  In order to prepare for this many students will be looking for jobs in all the wrong places.  Many of the large internet sites will make the list of frequent surfing.  In light of this increased amount of job searching among college students or recent college grads I ask you to consider this stat.

Last week I was the bi-annual meeting for the Career Services Advisory board of the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh.  At this meeting a recruiter from Enterprise Rent-A-Car was sitting next to me.  During the meeting he made the point that they hire nearly 50% of their people from employee referrals.  Did you catch that?

The largest employer of new college grads, 8,000 a year, said that they hire nearly half of all their new hires from employee referrals.  So I will ask again; why are you spending the majority of your time surfing Monster, CareerBuilder, and HotJobs, when you should be spending at least half of your time trying to network with current employees at the company you want to work at.  The numbers have been in for a long time, network beats every other job search strategy around.