Facebook friends open door to new employment

After she was made redundant, Derryn Brenan used social networking sites to keep in touch with contacts who might lead her to new work. Photo / Paul Estcourt

Derryn Brenan owes her new job at least partly to Facebook.

Mrs Brenan, 38, saw her 12-year career as an account director in advertising agencies collapse when "the bottom fell out of the market" late last year.

Unemployed for four months, she felt the biggest risk to her future career was in losing touch with the industry. To keep up, she turned to social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and Linked In.

"The guys I've been working with over the last two years are very into the new media," Mrs Brenan says.

"I kept my Facebook status updated and kept my network of people in the business aware of what I was doing and the sorts of things I was looking for.

"Every few weeks my network would broaden a little bit. It tells you if you have a friend in common and it will suggest [for example, if someone from a place where you've worked joins Facebook], 'Oh, you might know this person as well'."

A former colleague still in an advertising agency was particularly good at gossiping on Twitter about items such as agencies winning new accounts.

"Of course I followed them up and said, 'If you need new staff, give us a bell'," Mrs Brenan says.

She "wore out" her email contact list.

"I couldn't be ashamed to let people know I was out of work and looking for anything," she says.

"That led to two job interviews. I wasn't the right person for the job, but with one of them, three months later the guy rang back and said, 'There's another job'."

By that time she had finally secured the job she has now, a marketing contract with Mercury Energy which runs until Christmas. Her boss, the head of marketing, was a Facebook friend she had worked with in the past.

He stood down from the interview panel because of their past connection, but Mrs Brenan believes the link made the difference "in a roundabout way - totally".

"I'm sure it helped," she says. "Because we are Facebook friends he sees my updates and I see his. It means that when he's thinking of staff I'm fresh in his mind."

Mrs Brenan is now looking for a new job for next year and posted an update on her Facebook site yesterday.

By lunchtime, she had heard back from "two people from agency-land" saying, "We might have something for you."

With a husband still working, Mrs Brenan coped with unemployment financially, but still had to change her lifestyle.

"When you are a married couple with two good incomes, you do live up to that level," she says. "We dropped our Sky TV, we dropped our takeaways. We'd go to Green Rebel and the Mad Butcher. We saved $40 a week doing that. We just put everything else on hold - any car work, any new things that we needed.

"I ended up on antidepressants. I found it so hard to keep motivated, to keep applying when you don't even get an interview. For the last few times I'd been one of more than 100 applicants."

Mrs Brenan found the key was to keep busy. She made "I don't know how many batches of jam". She walked up the road every day to buy a Herald. She took a part-time job working casually in a hotel for $12.50 an hour.

"Taking that hotel job opened a couple of doors. Several people said to me, 'Why aren't you working with the marketing department of the hotel?"' she says.

"That was nice that they were looking out for me. You just never know where those little openings lead you."