Students looking for jobs quickly learn that solid credentials are good, but personal connections may be better.
Capitalizing on this reality is doostang.com, a "professional networking" website intended to enable students and alumni to build the personal connections needed to get noticed — and hired.
The site, which was launched in June 2005 by Stanford graduate Mareza Larizadeh and MIT grad Pavel Krapivin, has grown steadily in popularity at Stanford, MIT and Harvard and is beginning to generate buzz at Princeton.
Doostang student representatives Jesse Creed '07, William Peng '10 and Hosham Eltahir '10 are currently working with full-time employee Chelsea Burkett on spreading the word at Princeton through organizations such as Business Today and the Pre-Business Society. They are also using facebook.com to invite their classmates to join the Doostang network.
Burkett, who has worked as a full-time Doostang representative since she graduated from Stanford in 2006, became interested in the site her senior year after noticing that students pursuing nonbusiness careers faced a more difficult road to employment.
"College resources are strong in certain industries such as finance and investment banking, but beyond that resources are harder to come across," she said.
Creed echoed this sentiment, saying that students interested in the types of careers underrepresented on Tiger Tracks may appreciate having "a place to look for other opportunities."
The website claims to have helped hundreds of members get jobs in a variety of industries, including positions at Google, Kaplan, ABC, Goldman Sachs, MTV, Disney and Facebook.
Creed describes the company as "Facebook meets Monster," explaining that Doostang combines the sites' personal networking and job-search capabilities. Allowing recruiters and members to connect via groups and forums, the site offers a more personal career resource than most career websites, he said.
In enhancing the intimacy of online job searching and recruiting, Larizadeh said that Doostang is "making an extremely inefficient job market much more efficient."
Doostang employees said the efficiency of the site is largely due to its invitation-only exclusivity, which ensures that the quality and caliber of members remain high. Since its launch, the Doostang network has grown to include 60,000 members, including students and alumni from some of the world's most well-respected universities and business school programs.
"Companies say that they find the pool of applicants on this website are actually much more qualified [than those on other job websites]," Peng said.
One unique aspect of the site is that it allows members to see how many degrees of separation lie between them and other users. This feature of the site is based on Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter '65's finding that connections of two and three degrees of separation are the most useful when job-searching, a paradox that has been dubbed "the strength of weak ties."
It still remains to be seen, though, whether Doostang will take off at Princeton. "The big challenge isn't the product," Burkett said. "It's just a question of access and impressing upon Princeton students the value of expanding their network — even for freshmen and sophomores."
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