In years and decades gone by, and as recently as 30 years ago, there was no Internet. Career Networking has always been “social,” and that hasn’t changed. It was always about “who you know.”But compared to today, networking was far more “local” than today’s incredible ability to zoom around the globe in a New York minute via the Internet AND reach out and connect with an absolutely massive social network pool of people.In days gone by, career and professional Networking was restricted by the size of your immediate circle of contacts as an individual or in groups. These groups were all or mostly based in your local community.Networking was just a tool one used when one needed a job, and it wasn’t even always necessary. After you landed a job, you put networking back on the shelf until the next search. Those with a wide circle of business contacts enjoyed a substantial competitive advantage.Traditional “candidate flow” to fill job openings depended to some extent on referrals from employees or others within your industry. But firms leaned heavily on placing classified ads in newspapers and select trade/business publications-then waited to see what flowed in. If the resume return yielded a poor quality ‘harvest’ the process was repeated, perhaps multiple times, often lengthening the time it took to fill openings.Social networks and social media have radically changed the mechanism of candidate flow and effected a huge expansion in the use and importance of online social networking as well as in conducting your ‘people search’.The more engaged you are with social networks and in using social media channels to craft and promote your “message” about what you have to offer, the more you increase your odds of a successful career search outcome.With people changing or losing jobs far more frequently now than in the past, it is absolutely essential that you get plugged into and continually grow your own social network of contacts.Social networks have truly opened up the candidate pool to HR departments, and hiring managers as well as to third-party recruiters and headhunters. The time to locate candidates and fill jobs has decreased dramatically.There has been a corresponding and increasingly startling increase in the number of hiring managers and recruiters who report using social networks such as Facebook to source job candidates.Utilizing social networks in recruiting also includes conduct reputation, background checking, and digging further into a candidate’s background, skills, and experience–not to mention their choices in networking partners.Don’t be a spectator. Get involved. Contribute. And reap the rewards. With a properly conceived, well executed and ongoing ‘people search’, you can dramatically enhance your odds of obtaining a new job quickly when you are “temporarily displaced,” “downsized,” “right-sized,” or whatever they choose to call unemployment in the future. With an active social network, you’ll be ready for anything.