Personal Connections Are the Key to Finding a Job
C.J. Hayden, MCC
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.
C.J. Hayden is the author of Get Hired Now! and Get
Clients Now! Since 1992, she has helped thousands of professionals make a better
living doing what they love. C.J. is a Master Certified Coach who leads
workshops internationally " in person, on the phone, and on the web. Find out
more about C.J. and get a free copy of "How to Find a Job in 28 Days or Less" at
http://www.gethirednow.com.
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