Two Networking Tips
By Kevin Donlin | August 11th, 2008
I’m back from vacation and just now digging out from under 11 days of email.
(Note to self: email and turds are both 5 letters long. Coincidence?)
Anyway, one of the dozens of emails in my inbox came from a client, who wrote simply: “My network so far has been a bust.”
My advice to him could apply to you, if you’re feeling similarly downcast about how many job leads your network is producing.
So here it is …
Two ways to jump-start your networking are:
1) To get better results from your current network, give them another reason to want to hear from you each time you contact them.
Whether it’s news, a free bit of advice, or an offer to volunteer your expertise, when you give good things to people, they will want to hear from you again, which makes them more likely to pass your name on and remember you if a job opening appears on their radar.
Make a plan to contact 5 people in your network today and every day this month. At the end of 30 days, you will have made 150 followup contacts. You can’t help but get job leads this way.
2) To expand your network and contact new people, make a plan to add 2-3 names each day to your LinkedIn connections.
After 30 days, that’s another 60-90 people added to your network who can send you job leads.
One of my clients in Fla. got a job last week in Tenn. specifically by contacting a recruiter he found on LinkedIn who was connected to him. Turns out the recruiter was looking for someone exactlylike my client, who would have never found out about the job — which was unadvertised! — had he not reached out to the recruiter who had recently joined his network on LinkedIn.
As Wayne Gretzky reportedly once said, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” If you don’t build your network and reach out to the people in it every day, you’ll miss job offers that go to other candidates who take more shots than you.
As a corollary to all this, remember: It’s not your network that gives you job leads, it’s the people in your network. Stop thinking of your network as a fuzzy, impersonal object and start seeing the individual faces of the people who populate it.
Anything you do to meet more people and make them glad that they know you will shorten your job search.
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