Guerrilla Marking for Job Hunters 2.0 - Jay Conrad Levinson [98]
■ SELECT TWISTS ON TRADITIONAL NETWORKING
Okay, so maybe you want to network in person. If that’s the case, here’s how to find the venues you need and what to do when you get there.
➤ Networking Venues
Every town and city in the United States has a “hot spot”; a place where all the “heavy hitters” congregate. Find it and join. The easiest way to locate these business or professional alliances is to ask professional people such as your banker, insurance agent, or investment consultant what groups they belong to. The main job of bank managers is to solicit new business, and to do that they go where the influential people in town congregate. It will probably be a civic organization, golf club, or industry association. It really depends on where you live.
Your contact network should always be growing, and the best way to expand it is to seek out new people and build relationships. It doesn’t really matter whom you choose, as long as you like them, they like you, and you can help each other. And when you get a job, let them know they helped with a quick note of thanks.
➤ Classmates.com
The granddaddy online community-based networking is Classmates. com. The basic version is free. Using Classmates is closer to traditional networking because it’s based on your alumni. At Classmates, you can join a network of people you went to school with (high school, college, or university) as well as military, industry, or company alumni. The challenge with using it to source contacts is that you need to search by state. I did a search for PeopleSoft in New York State and found only one connection.
On the other hand, if you want to reach out to people you went to school with to reconnect and network, then Classmates is the way to go.
A WAR STORY
Dave Opton
One Classmates.com member, a Notre Dame alum, read in BusinessWeek that more CFOs attended his alma mater than any other university, so he obtained the list and wrote to them all. His “good old college try” netted him 3 interviews and one offer.
Another member leveraged his college connection when he learned his school was going to be in the NCAA tournament in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As a demonstration of school spirit, he decided to attend the event, but not before attending a professional association meeting. At the meeting, he learned of an Ann Arbor position that perfectly fit his credentials, so he scheduled an interview while he was in town for the tournament. He became happily employed in a new location as a result.
Dave Opton, president, ExecuNet (www.execunet.com). Reach Dave at www.linkedin.com/in/dopton/.
➤ Other Alumni Networks
If you’re looking to make inroads with Fortune 1000 companies, then use a keyword search in Google to see if they have a corporate alumni web site. Many do and it’s the easiest way to find people. The command for Google is “[name of the company]” and alumni (see Figure 8.3).
Figure 8.3 Alumni approach.
If former employees have an alumni site, this will find it. We were looking for Lotus Notes people recently and found this site through that query: www.axle.org.
GUERRILLA INTELLIGENCE
Women and Networking
Penelope Trunk
One of the reasons the glass ceiling persists is because networking is key to getting ahead and women are not as effective as men at building a network. For one thing, men, more than women, are likely to be invited out to dinner (since men are doing the inviting). Also, men, more than women, are likely to have the time to network outside the office (since women are the primary caretakers of children even when both spouses work).
If you are a woman who thinks you do not have a problem networking, you are wrong: when men entertain clients at basketball games and strip clubs, you are not invited. Don’t tell me you don’t work with men