Power of Networking
Whether you are actively, passively or not search for a job at all and that last one will be an entirely separate article. The power of networking is incredible. I can say that because I have gotten many positions thanks to my professional and personal networks.
Why is this such a powerful tool in your job search belt?
Let me preface that with saying that I attended a happy hour networking event at a company in the contract and perm placement industry last night. I went for two reasons. One, I needed to be out with people. When you are in the job search, it is a bit of a silo. Most of the day it is just you. Also, going to be another article. Two, I needed to meeting people that could help me or I might be able to help them. I meet a few people and try to learn about them professionally but sometimes it gets into their personal life as well. I do that to understand the people that I am adding to my network. How many times when speaking to a recruiter and the position isn't right for you and they ask, Do you know anyone that might be interested? Truthfully I have about a 70% hit rate for knowing someone.
For my career I have had the pleasure of of having that very scenario happen to me multiple times and today I am going to tell you the strangest story of how networking got me a job and it involves both professional and personal relationships, so stay with me on this one because it is a strange one.
If you have been around for a while you should remember the 2001-2003 timeframe and what happened there. It was an almost perfect storm. The Y2K disaster that never happened and I could go on in great detail as to how that fed into the problem. The Dot Com bust that also fed into the problem and overall economic problems all happened in less than a year in late 2000 to early 2001.
领英推荐
In 2001 into 2002 I was working a contract position with McDonald's Corp Headquarters for a project that was supposed to streamline front of store operations. Ultimately it was shelved, my contract ended and I went on to the next contract. Roll forward to mid 2004 my wife at that time and I decided we needed to move from the suburbs of Chicago to the Nashville TN area. I had been getting interviews in the area but no one would pull the trigger. They all said they didn't want to relocate me and I would tell them I am not looking for relocation just a job. We sold our house in 1 day and three weeks later we were on our way to Nashville. Someone in my network got me an interview to teach at ITT so I became an adjunct instructor while I was looking for a full time job. By the way that's just part of the story.
We had been here about eight weeks and a friend of the family was doing a mortgage for someone that was a director at a very prominent healthcare company. They got to talking about what he did and he mentioned they were looking for someone and had been for a year and a half. My friend says, what you're looking for sounds like a friend of ours that just moved here and starts going into some of my details. His client tells him to have me get him my resume and to call him. I got that information and proceeded to email my resume and the next day I called.
We had a great conversation and he told me that he would send my resume to the hiring manager and gave me his name so I would know who was calling me. Roll forward a few days and I was taking my son to daycare as I had a Friday morning class to teach and I get a call. The person on the other end introduces himself and asks if I can come in that afternoon for an interview and the next thing is the strange part. He then says, my boss thinks he knows you. I went in and met with the hiring manager then met with his boss the VP. Sure enough we did know each other. He worked for a well known system integrator that was also working on that project at McDonald's. My network went full circle. Working with someone somewhere that became part of my professional network, to my personal network working with someone in their personal business to his professional network that then ultimately came back to my professional network.
The morale of the story is don't give up. Keep meeting people and building that network. I did that last night at the event and added a person that can help me but maybe even more important is the people I met that I might be able to help them.