One of the selling points, I guess, of joining a fraternity or sorority is of course the clubhouse aspect: that your having been in a particular house will endear you to someone who has the power to hire you.
Has this ever worked, really? If anything, wouldn’t it mean that there is a greater chance that the person with the power to hire you was in a different house and would therefore be less interested in hiring you?
Nope, never mattered and I doubt it’s mattered for about anyone I know.
A better argument is that it give you a chance to network. That has some real advantages for both landing a job and being successful at one. If you have a large group of friends and acquaintences which are within your city and others nearby, as well as potentially annual gatherings with them, you may have numerous opportunities to make beneficial connections.
You can gain clients. You can learn about job openings. You can meet mutual friends. You can get information about companies in and out of your industry.
It’s unlikely that any reputable businessman would hire someone they don’t know based wholly on sharing the same fraternity credo, but that’s not to say that membership doesn’t have it’s professional advantages like membership to any other large society or club.
Not for me either but it did work for my roommate.
I wonder if being in a fraternity in a “better” school is a bit different. My roomie went to Duke and very recently checked his fraternity list for members in Chicago and chased after a few for a job and got one. My frat was meant as a social outlet and was of pretty much no use after college.
I wasn’t a member of a frat but I would imagine that the net working would help or at the very least wouldn’t hurt if you stayed active in the alumni organization after graduation. Do not put your frat/sorority affiliation on your resume though. If I see that it goes straight in the garbage.
My first job out of college was with a fraternity brother from my college who was about 10 years older. Turns out he was a nutcase.
I also landed my second job through a fraternity brother of a high school friend.
After B-school I landed a job at a Big-4 consulting firm because a fraternity brother of mine also worked there.
Being part of a fraternity or sorority can definitely help you land a job. It’s a good source of networking that puts you above just some random Joe off the street. There are a couple of caveats though:
-Every job I’ve always been qualified for
-My fraternity was at a fairly prestigeous school
-My fraternity brothers tend to be work hard, play hard types as opposed to drunken looser douchebags. More on that later.
I would not put my fraternity credentials on my resume unless you were a house officer and even then, maybe not specify the house you were in. Unless you were in my house, I could care less. At best I’d think “meh…in a fraternity…BFD”. At worst, I might think you are still in college mode.
The problem is that people have different perceptions of fraternity guys. You don’t know if a hiring manager will be like “Hey! I used to party with those guys!” or “those assholes trashed my car before dieing in a house fire caused by some drunken Pledge trying to fix himself a pierogi.”