Networking: Synergy & Serendipity
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| Title: | Networking: Synergy & Serendipity | |
| Author: | Stephen Rosen, PhD | |
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You may reach a point in your Informational Interviewing when you have defined your goals and interviewed knowledgeable people in your chosen field, but you have not yet obtained a job. What you need are more contacts, that is, people who know people who may have a job for you.
Techniques that use personal contacts are the most successful. Studies at Harvard University by sociologist Mark Granovetter examined professionals who successfully changed jobs. Three-fourths of the successful job seekers obtained their employment through their own initiative and personal solicitations to potential employers. (For comparison, the "standard" methods, such as use of ads, employment agencies and recruiters, and "others" accounted for less than ten percent each of total successful job landings. U.S. Department of Labor and other studies confirm and elaborate these findings. The successful "personal contact" methods include those described in this Workbook.)
Here are the most common methods by which employers find employees in order of priority and success:
Here are the ways most people search for jobs:
Informational Interviews can lead you to jobs because the people that you meet provide a network of relationships to other people, whose network of relationships may include a person who has a job for you. Research shows that you are about three to five people away from the person you want to meet who is a key to your next job opportunity. For example, you may not realize that your own contacts or circle of acquaintances may include at least two hundred individuals. If each contact knows two hundred others, each of whom knows two hundred more, your "contact pool" is a combined network of about eight million individuals.
You will therefore need to prioritize your potential contacts into the following three categories:
Networking and Informational Interviews are similar in that both provide useful information and are a way to expand you circle of contacts. A Networking Interview (unlike a Job Interview) is, however, more clearly aimed at providing you with access to appropriate targets, people that your contact knows. Try to locate Gate Keepers--people who can offer you multiple referrals related to your job objective.
It is a big mistake to ask for an Informational Interviewing and attempt to convert it into a Job Interview. Never misrepresent yourself this way.
Try to elicit as much active assistance as possible from your contact. The best possible outcome occurs if your contact sets up the meeting with the target and attends. Almost as helpful: the contact calls to set up the meeting; or the contact writes a letter, perhaps encloses your resume and recommends meeting you. It is certainly still very useful to you if the contacts allow you to use their name.
In planning the Networking Interview, consider the following points (suggested by career consultant David Rottman).
A relationship network resembles a spider's web: touch one part of the web and the rest reverberates; push a little too hard, and the web snaps.
Social Intelligence, Emotional Competence
People with high social intelligence are enormously qualified for life, said Howard Gardner, a psychologist at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University . Dr. Gardner's 1983 book A Frames of Mind (Basic Books), in which he proposed that there are several other important kinds of intelligence beyond abilities for math or language, has been highly influential in the new appreciation of social intelligence, or what has been called emotional competence.
Social intelligence, Dr. Gardner said, allows people to take maximum advantage of the resources of others. We are finding that much of people's effective intelligence is, in a sense, outside the brain, Dr. Gardner said. Your intelligence can be within other people, if you know how to get them to help you. In life, that's the best strategy: mobilize other people.
He adds: If you have social intelligence, you know that this only works if there's some kind of mutuality. If it's all one way, people will end up feeling you've exploited them. Making professional contacts is an exchange of information, a social, a form of learned behavior.
It is impossible to learn to play the violin, to learn to swim or to dance, by merely reading a book. These skills -- like contact or informational interviewing, professional networking, contact development, job interviewing, salary negotiation -- all require practice, practice, and more practice. This is the same answer the Jewish grandmother gave to the stranger who asked her, Can you give me directions to get to Carnegie Hall?
You cannot learn all of the skills needed to find work in a social universe or community of employers by simply reading this or any other printed matter. You must be out there getting interviews (and even getting rejected) for these methods to work. It is the difference between theory and experiment. Let me say this in another way: If you wish to create children, it's fine to study Freud; but eventually you have to make serious, practical contact with the opposite sex.
Expanding Your Network
Networking is an improvable skill, a learnable art, like emotional intelligence, which has such very high survival value in the marketplace that Daniel Goleman (Emotional Intelligence, 1995, Bantam Books, NY) calls it's the master aptitude.
But to those who are reluctant to call or write to strangers, to ask for advice, it is important to overcome your resistance. It may be useful to remember: Imperfect movement is better than perfect paralysis.
Using the Telephone to Get Face to Face Meetings
Telephones bring order and organization to our lives. Yet they change the nature of how you communicate and exercise your social intelligence, and how you mobilize other people
However, for networking purposes, if you are very shy, it probably makes sense to (1) write, (2) call, and (3) visit a target in that order.
To create an honest (low-pitched voice, speaking slowly) and intelligent (speaking fast) impression on others, your wisest policy is to present your truest and best natural self in any interview.
When you see how you present yourself in an interview on video-tape, you can make an objective analysis of how you are seen by others. This is a major benefit of video-tape feedback in preparation and coaching for information-, networking- and job-interviews. It helps to have such rehearsals or practice sessions immediately prior to the interview. It also helps if your practice coach asks tough, even hostile, questions. This helps you make your mistakes in a practice setting which does not hurt your job-search. Since everyone will make mistakes in the art of networking, it helps a great deal if you make all your mistakes as quickly as possible. |
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Stephen Rosen, PhD is a principal partner at Celia Paul Associates in New York, and author of Career Renewal (Academic Press, New York ). He specializes in medical and scientific careers. |
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Republished with permission |
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