A Great Networking Strategy That Can Really Open Doors

In addition to leveraging Linkedin.com, there are a lot of great ways to network, and there's one that I used may years ago to land a job. It involved creating a summary sheet which I used to market myself. It was comprised of a high-level summary of my years of experience, a bulletized list of skills and relevant achievements, a list of industries I was focusing on, and an alphabetized list of companies I was specifically targeting. I came up with this list of companies after two days of research at the library. Today, so much is available online, making this exercise even easier. I consulted Standard & Poors' and Moody's listing of companies in the US. Each was organized in three sections: straight alphabetical order, by geography (state) and then by industry. I then kept a supply of these with me and handed them to neighbors, friends, my parents' friends, etc. You never know who knows someone else, so leave no stone unturned!

I then composed a cover letter letting friends, relatives and former colleagues know that I was in the midst of a job search and that I was researching companies that I wanted to learn more about that I was targeting. I invited them (if they wouldn't mind) to take a look at the summary sheet and let me know if they knew of anyone at any of those companies who might be willing to spend 15 minutes with me to provide insight into those companies, and what it was like to work there. Inevitably, those who agreed to speak or meet with me spent more than 15 minutes. I tried whenever possible to get in front people as the added face-to-face contact typically resulted in them becoming more invested in me, and they tended to feel more confident about referring me once they had met me. Bear in mind, I never asked for a job; I merely was engaged in an information-gathering process. It was a very non-threatening way to get referrals. In my experience, people really DO like to help others, and they also enjoy speaking about their own experiences.

One referral can easily lead to many others. My biggest challenge was keeping track of who referred me to whom, so I tracked this horizontally in rows on an Excel spreadsheet. I was sure to send handwritten thank-you notes to everyone who had provided a lead, letting them know if it resulted in a meeting, a phone conversation, a further referral or otherwise bore any fruit. In this case, it did when I landed a great job in HR at NBC in New York.