Networking — The Secret to Professional Connectivity

Networking is the gentle art of getting personal introductions to potential employers through people you know.

Employers favor it because hires from personal referrals are seen to be faster, cheaper and result in an employee who is productive more quickly and who stays with the company longer. It works for you, because these factors give any employer a favorable attitude towards your candidacy.

Networking — Seven Job Search Networks We All Need

Productive networking is all about your connectivity to relevant people, ideally within your profession, and then having productive conversations that generate leads, referrals and introductions. Like most professionals you have probably been too busy doing your job to build effective networks, so your existing networks are easily exhausted.

Here are seven networks you can use to accelerate your job search, stabilize your long-term career management strategies, and enhance your quality of life.

10 Important Networking Strategies

Productive networking is about getting the names of relevant people within your profession and having focused, productive conversations that generate leads, referrals and introductions. Most successful professionals have been too busy doing their jobs to network, so their networks are anemic and easily exhausted. Here are ten effective ways to increase your networking productivity.

Introduction to Social Networking

A typical career spans half a century, and in that time you can reasonably expect the good the bad and the downright ugly to occur in your professional life.

It's the rough times when you need people, and networking, with its focus on talking to friends and colleagues it offers a great job-hunting technique that also lessens the feelings of rejection everyone suffers through on a job hunt. Nevertheless, it fails for many job hunters because those networks lack relevance and depth.

More On Social Networking

Social networking exploded on the Internet after the launch of a dating site called Friendster, and while this created many hot-date clones it has also generated over 100 business networking and personal interest sites.

The personal interest social networking sites cover everything from baseball to photography, while the business networking sites can be general in nature, like Linkedin.com, or profession specific such as spoke.com, which caters to sales professionals around the world. Many of the sites have formal "sub networks" for special interests such as women in business, or have local geographic nets to enable people to meet in person. Regardless of your professional orientation or personal interests there is probably an online network site that could be supportive of your job hunting and career management initiatives.

10 Smart Social Networking Strategies

A social networking strategy can really impact your job search. Consider these ten tactics to increase your social networking productivity:

Reaching Out, Making Contact

When you use social networking sites in your job search, the people of most interest to you will likely fall into two basic categories:

• Those who might hire you
• Those who have common professional experience and are consequently high-value networking contacts

With the potential hiring managers, usually one or two title levels above you, the approach will be professional and direct, sending an email to introduce yourself (see Knock em Dead Cover Letters) and ask that they look at your bio, which of course is your resume. If this contact proceeds to a conversation and interviews, fine, if not you can ask for leads and suggestions.