USE NETWORKING TO FIND A JOB
Network Your Way to Work: Personal Connections Are the Key to Finding a Job
When Cookie Burkhalter relocated from Colorado to Wilmington, Delaware three
years ago, she thought finding a new job would be easy. With first-rate qualifications
and more than twenty years of professional experience at Fortune 500 companies,
she figured she would land a new position quickly by surfing a few Internet
job boards and sending out her résumé.
But Burkhalter, an IT project manager, quickly discovered that it wasn’t
going to be so easy. After months of applying for open positions, “I never
got a single interview from a posting on the Net,” she declared. “Applying
for all those jobs was a complete waste of my time.”
When things began to turn around for Burkhalter was when she realized that
the missing element in her job search was the human factor. “Even though
I grew up in Delaware, I had been living out of state for a long time,”
she recalled. “I had almost no local contacts, so I was relying on postings
and ads to find out about available jobs. But by the time I saw the ad, so had
thousands of other people, and there was always one of them who was just a little
more qualified than me.”
So Burkhalter set about rebuilding her personal network. She joined two women’s
groups made up of others who shared some of her personal interests and hobbies,
and began to meet new people. When she let her new friends know about her job
search, all of a sudden, she began to hear about jobs before they were advertised,
and interviews started to materialize. When she finally did land a new job,
it was the direct result of a referral from a friend.
You may not recognize what Burkhalter did as networking, but that’s exactly
what it was. Many women think of networking as circulating around a room exchanging
business cards. But a broader view of networking is creating a pool of contacts
from which you can draw leads, referrals, ideas, and information for your job
search. You can network without ever attending an official networking event.
Texas resident Maria Elena Duron found an executive job as a result of working
as a community volunteer. “I was volunteering at the Midlands MexTex Fiesta,
and I found myself flipping burgers side-by-side with a board member of the
Austin Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation," Duron remembers. "He
asked me if I had ever been involved in fundraising, and when I said I had,
he asked for my résumé. He forwarded it to the Foundation with
his personal recommendation, and three weeks later I was hired as Executive
Director for the West Texas Region."
Your career network can and should contain current and former co-workers, alumni
from your school, a wide range of people in your industry, and personal friends.
Making time for lunch or coffee with these people can be much more productive
for your job search than reading the want ads or surfing the web. In fact, surveys
consistently show that 80-85% of job-seekers find work as the result of a referral
from a friend or colleague, and only 2-4% land jobs from Internet job boards.
If you have been out of touch for a while with people you already know, don’t
let that stop you from re-establishing contact when you start your job search.
Everyone you speak to will have had to look for work at some point in their
career, and most of them will be sympathetic and helpful.
To spread your net even wider, you may need to start making the acquaintance
of new people also. Every time you talk to a friend or colleague about your
job search, ask for suggestions of other you might speak to, and follow up on
their referrals.
Attending organized events may also play a role in your job search, since this
can be an easy way to expand your network quickly. Here are some popular choices
for networking events:
- Chamber of Commerce mixers
- Service clubs such as Rotary and Kiwanis
- Trade and professional association meetings in your industry
- Lectures, workshops, conferences, and fundraisers hosted by educational
institutions, community organizations, and affinity groups
- Social, cultural, and sporting events that include receptions or other
mix-and-mingle time
- Private gatherings organized for the purpose of meeting new people and
schmoozing
- Job clubs
You will have more success at this kind of networking if you go back to the
same groups over and over than if you keep going to new groups all the time.
Find two or three that seem to have the right mix of people, and keep going
back.
If you don't follow up with the people you meet, though, you are wasting your
time in meeting them. You may think that once you have told someone what type
of job you are looking for, if they hear of something, they will call you. The
truth is that if they have met you only once, they probably don't even remember
you, and it's even less likely that they will remember where they put your number.
After meeting someone new, send them a “nice-to-meet-you” note
and invite them to attend another event with you or make a date for lunch or
coffee. Find out what the two of you have in common, and see if there is an
activity you could share.
Building relationships likes this takes time and effort, but relationships
are the core of networking. The people in your network should be people you
truly enjoy interacting with, because if you’re doing it right, you’ll
be spending a lot of time with them.
Says Duron, "Don't limit yourself to just networking in your industry;
everyone is interconnected. Getting to know a day care director makes sense
even if you don't want a job in day care, because she knows so many people.
Waiters and hairdressers are often the first to hear about coming changes that
lead to open positions. As long as you have your antennae out and listen, you
can connect with anyone."
Don’t expect networking to be a quick fix for your job search. It can
take time for your relationship-building efforts to pay off. You need to put
in the effort to get to know people, and trust that you will see results from
it. But the best time to begin building your network is while you are still
employed. (by C.J. Hayden is the author of Get Clients NOW! Thousands of
business owners and salespeople have used her simple sales and marketing system
to double or triple their income)
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