1. In the Twin Cities Metro there are 4K LinkedIn listings with “marketing communications” mentioned, 59K with “sales,” and 31K with “engineer.” 65% social media participants users use to stay in touch with friends, 47% use social media “for work” and but only 26-28% use it for “career search.” # That means you need to develop strategies to be appealing to all kinds of networkers who will find you there and you need a very well written profile and customized communications to rise above the clutter.
2. The average reader spends 8-10 seconds with a profile. Your full resume does NOT belong in LinkedIn. The correct profile is closer to an executive bio in a corporate website.
3. LinkedIn should not be viewed as a stand-alone tool especially by those of you who are uncomfortable pairing LinkedIn activities with networking done in-person or by phone. Using LinkedIn exclusively can actually damage your professional image if your best means of reaching out to someone is the pre-written and highly superficial messages available by default in the system. Aim for a small, high quality network of people you can vouch for and whom you can trust to recommend you effectively. Consider that you will be judged by the quality of relationships you exhibit there. When you suddenly need a strong recommendation, a large quantity of poor quality contacts in your network will dilute the credibility of someone who really has considerable knowledge of you, especially if they use the standard messaging and tools to recommend you.
4. Hide your contacts. You want to manage how, why, and when others are reaching out to your best contacts and clients. The social media are mechanical software tools that encourage use without much thought which may be good as a strategy for the company LinkedIn, but bad as yours. Approximately 1/3 of the requests I receive through electronic social media I consider inappropriate to someone else in the relationship. The sender did not think hard before sending the request because it was easy to do so. If they had to make the same request in person they would have thought about it a lot more carefully. I think it is also happening more because people are in a panic over job security.
5. Hiring managers prefer people who are currently employed and can buy access to all 40 million names. There are many ways to reach potential hirees without buying a job ad in LinkedIn and most hiring managers are not bothering to. Ads on the 2 big job boards declined 5-44% last year depending on industry.
6. You are judged in LinkedIn as much by your EQ as by your IQ. An ExecuNet study (12/08) showed:
   • 86% exec recruiters search online for information beyond resume
   • 70% say their opinion of job seeker improves if find positive info on internet
7. We know that being active and engaged in LinkedIn activities improves your rank in LinkedIn searches:
   • Include a picture
   • Participate in discussion groups and Q+A with others
   • Answer InMail queries from others and pass profiles onwards if and only if you can vouch for the recommendation
   • Give and get recommendations
   • Name corporate, academic awards, boards, associations, biz charities
8. Remember that what you post in social media is VERY public and available to be scrutinized and commented on by many critics. A recent survey by Career Builder and highlighted in the Wall St Journal stated that 35% of employers report they found content on social media sites that caused them not to hire a candidate. ##
   • Candidate showed poor communication skills – 29%
   • Candidate lied about qualifications – 24 %
   • Candidate shared confidential information from previous employer – 20 %
9. If you think about the experience of the person searching for a resource in LinkedIn, he/she is confronted with 100-500 profiles (depending on subscription level) with similar titles or search criteria. The first profile the seeker will reach out to will demonstrate:
   • Better accomplishments than their peers
   • Good communication skills, and transparency of skills
   • Candor, warmth, accessibility, and ethics
   • NO Political, racial, religious, marital status, or sexual preference mentions because Hiring Managers will avoid downloading it for fear of an EEO lawsuit

So, invest some time and effort into your LinkedIn strategies. Don’t use the software as your only means of networking. Don’t settle for its default messages. Think about the paradigm of the other people in the LinkedIn network and what they might want from you when they are looking at your profile. LinkedIn has huge potential but can be more damaging than helpful to your career image if used too casually.

#   http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Adult_social_networking_data_memo_FINAL.pdf
## http://online.wsj.com/article/PR-CO-20090819-902554.html

Here are important tips for a successful relationship with a recruiter, when you are the candidate.

• Interview the recruiting firm. A firm may cover many roles, such as Sales, Marketing, IT, Engineering, Senior Finance and Accounting, Training, Organizational Development, Human Resources. Individual recruiters have industry specialties like medical device, durable goods, etc… The recruiter needs to assess whether one of the recruiters in the group is likely to have jobs that fit you. Most great recruiters have hands on experience in the field they cover. For instance, I have 10+ years as a VP of Marketing and I recruit marketers and others. A good finance recruiter might have a CPA and experience in one of the Big 4 accounting firms.
• Understand the recruiter’s world. The recruiter’s time is driven by clients who contract with the recruiting firm to find many different kinds of candidates. For this reason, recruiters do not know which searches they will work on next week or if they will have jobs that fit your background in the near future. However, when recruiters do fill job in your area during the course of a typical year, the recruiter definitely wants you to be in the candidate database. Then the recruiter can call you when those jobs show up and see if the time is right for you and if you are interested in the particular job the recruiter describes. Importantly, your resume and name are not shared with any hiring manager unless you say you would like to it be submitted to that client and that job. A great recruiter takes that very seriously, because a recruting firm with several recruiters and an excellent reputaton  has far more to lose than gain by violating that policy.
• Optimize your communication with your recruiter. Be smart. This is a free service to you, so you are expected to follow a particular etiquette.
  • Be available for questions.
  • Answer all questions honestly.

  If a recruiter is not getting cooperation during the process, the recruiter will gravitate to another candidate. Note that many hiring managers have also worked with the same great recruiting firm as candidates, so great recruiters are very used to keeping those relationships straight and your information confidential. Recruiter income depends on maintaining positive relationships both on the candidate and client side.

• Choose a great recruiter and feel honored when you get homework. A great firm has more connections, locally and nationally, and a more rigorous process for getting to know you. It costs the clients more and they get what they pay for. This means a great recruiter will spend a little more time with you than other firms demand. This means when your great recruiter introduces you to a client, it is more likely be a good fit for both of you.
• Be ready when your recruiter interviews you in person. The process of talking to a great recruiter usually starts with an email or phone call and a discussion of your resume and marketability to the firm’s clients. When your great recruiter has a job that he/she thinks fits you, your recruiter will ask you to visit in person. A great recruiting firm’s clients expect them to deliver the best culture/personality match as well as a skill set match.
• Trust your great recruiter to negotiate for you. Once your recruiter has shown your information to a client, the next step is to arrange the interviews and negotiate dollars on your behalf. Since your recruiter negotiates dollars on the behalf of candidates many times a week and recruiting fees are based on a percentage of your expected compensation, your great recruiter is interested in obtaining a high but reasonable salary for you and can usually negotiate a higher offer for you than you can on your own. The client expects a great recruiting firm to manage the salary and interview process.
• Wait for the call. When you are active in the candidate database, you do not have to call once a week to check in. Because a great recruiter will not send your information anywhere without asking you first, you will get a call with a position description when your recruiter has a job open that fits you.
• Stay active in the database. Send an email 1-2 times/month. It keeps you top of mind if you send an email to your recruiter every 2-4 weeks. This information and all of the notes on you are stored in a database for the entire team of great recruiters to see. In each email, be sure to mention:
  • you are still available
  • where you have been interviewing so the recruiter can expand on your own efforts
• It matters where you’ve been. Sharing where you have been interviewing is important because a great recruiter cannot show you to a client where you have already been submitted in the last 6-12 months (depending on how long a client keeps resumes.) The list also helps the great recruiting firm understand what kinds of roles and companies appeal to you and how flexible you are. Telling your recruiter what went well and badly in the interview (even if your recruiter’s firm did not arrange the meeting) helps your recruiter understand where you will be most salable. It makes all the recruiters at a great recruiting firm more willing to go out of their way for you.
• Support your recruiter’s reputation and you support yourself. Share your whole network. Contribute to everyone’s success. Recruiters find candidates names through a variety of sources. Most placements come from candidates recommended to the recruiters personally. Great recruiters pride themselves on knowing people who are very good at what they are doing whether that person is looking for an opportunity or not. Clients expect great recruiters to provide the candidates who are great. The client not only does not care if that candidate is looking, they also want the recruiters to find the people they can’t on their own. So clients do not want recruiters to provide people who are in databases like Monster.com. They expect the recruiter provide an added value not found in those public sources. That means your great recruiter will ask you who you know who is great at what they do, whether that person is looking or not. Even if your friend is not looking they may lead your recruiter to a very good candidate who is. (Eagles hang out with eagles.) This networking is one of the courtesies a great recruiter expects of you in exchange for looking for opportunities for your career for no money fee. This networking process is how the great recruiter gets leads to jobs to fill, so it may lead to uncovering a job you can fill. And when you help your recruiter to be better connected, your recruiter has an easier time attracting the kinds of clients you want hire you.
• Ask about how the recruiting process works. The better educated you are, the more effectively you can negotiate the process to your advantage. The better educated you are, the easier for your great recruiter to place you. Please ask questions!

I am in my 50s. Yes, age bias exists and, yes, it is illegal. You won’t always be able to avoid it. But age bias is sometimes not really about your actual age, it is about certain soft skills and attitudes that employers desire but older employees are less likely to value. And if you learn to address those issues, you can make concerns about age go away.

Attitude

First of all, if you think the world is against you, I will bet it shows in your interviews. You need to peel back the layers on your emotions. Do you think society has fouled up again? That young managers don’t know what they are doing? Or is it that you don’t know how/where to sell yourself at this stage of your career and are afraid?

Your focus should be to find the companies for which you are a highly desirable applicant just as you are and to present yourself to those companies in a manner that makes you one of the first applicants to be selected for an interview. While this may require a stronger sell than was necessary a few years ago, it is not at all impossible. It just requires some additional strategic layers and may indicate a different kind of company than the one you left. For instance, a smaller company or start-up may prefer a more experienced candidate to obtain a greater depth of industry knowledge with a smaller staff count. Or target your skills in business development (well-documented with case histories) to a company who has been struggling with the issue for some time.

If you are significantly overqualified for a job description as written, don’t spend a lot of time applying for it. The company will be concerned that you will leave as soon as you find a job for which you are better suited. You could offer to sign a contract promising that you will stay at least 2 years, but they will still be concerned that you will become crabby in the role because you are being under-utilized and that you will be disruptive to the balance of the team structure.

Trends in age of employees

• 2000-2003
  • The number of workers under the age of 45 was constant.
  • The number of workers over 45 increased 86%.
• 2005
  • 45% of workers are over the age of 45.
• 2010 projected
  • Labor shortage due as baby boomers retire
  • Most boomers plan to work full-time or part-time after retiring.

How older workers are perceived

• More expensive than younger employees doing the same work (usually true).
• Difficult to supervise, they think they know more than team mates. Poor or selective follow-up.
• Inflexible, grumpy, frumpy, more likely to argue. Poor communication skills. Less political.
• Hard to train, don’t know new technology.
• Disconnected from company vision and younger team-mates. Prefer to be sole contributors.
• Get sick more often (false).
• Low and declining energy. Resist overtime.

Market demand for new hires

• As the pace of corporate innovation increases, the duration of the average permanent job decreases because company priorities change more rapidly, and your seniority or longevity may be irrelevant. The career track you were on for the last ___ years doesn’t matter. The employer wants to know if you can hit the ground running for today’s needs.
• 2 out of 100 resumes result in a job offer.
• A resume needs to be better written to be effective because employers have access to more resumes through websites and job databases. Is your resume well-written enough that you will be one of the interviewees chosen from 20 resumes? 100?

Strategies to try

So what am I saying? Learn and emphasize what a company values in today’s market. Make sure you know how to sell yourself. Focus on the benefits of your depth of knowledge, but make sure you also counter the expected negative attitudes associated with older workers. Note the ways attitude as well as knowledge is being addressed in the bullets below:

• “I really enjoy being on teams which solve problems and grow business.” Don’t just say “I have lots of experience” which would emphasize the gap in age but not the quality of experience and your willingness to be a team member.
• “I have the contacts to drive growth.”
• “I thrive in fast-paced environments.”
• To an insurance or medical company with older customers: “I may understand your customer better than a younger applicant.”
• “Yes, I supervised many people. Learned how to work with lots of different kinds of people. Can we take a tour of the company? I would like to see how you do it.“
• “I can start as a part-time consultant to let you evaluate what I offer at a small cost.”
• “I just attended a conference on that new technology and was a panelist.”

Your “Board of Directors” should include:

• People from industries similar to the ones you have been in and they have been in a role that would have at least interfaced with you so they can give informed, intelligent advice.
• People senior enough that they will not be afraid to disagree with you or tell you that you are missing a point and they are also senior enough that they are credible to you and offer wisdom you may not yet have had the chance to learn.
• No one on your board should be family, spouse, or significant other although these people will offer some insight about how you fit in a company culturally based on what you bitch about when you get home at night.
• A former customer.
• A former direct supervisor or someone who is truly senior to you on the same path you are considering and has been very successful at it. Ideally they should have evolved to a larger, more impressive company or role since they worked with you on a daily basis.
• A former direct report whose opinion you respect. Be brave enough to pick someone who has hop-scotched past your title and is now senior to you.
• One should have had your exact title, and similar business challenges. For instance, if you are currently a Product Manager focused on New Product Development, you want someone like that advising you.
• One should be a good general purpose business person with a broad understanding of company strategies you may not have yet been exposed to. If you are a Product Manager, look for someone who is a General Manager. If you are a Marketing Communications Specialist, pick someone who has risen to be Director or VP of Marketing. You want someone 2-3 steps above you in the pecking order.

See the pattern?

They need to be people who can show you how to get 33% ahead in your career. They need to know enough about what you do that you will actually listen because they are giving real, credible advice that is practical on an every day basis as well as in the long term.

Here is how you use them:

• You meet maybe 3-4 times a year in a location where you can talk about company issues and politics without being overheard.
• Meet with them as a group, not individually. The synergy that comes from group think will make the advice richer and keep it focused on you instead of drifting to the personal experiences of your advisors. They will be more willing to discuss some awkward issues as a group versus when they are talking to you as a friend one-on-one because they are confirming each other’s views. The group setting makes it easier to deliver those topics in a nurturing way that keeps friendships intact.
• If you assemble the board you need to be ready to listen. If you don’t listen, the process may have backfire and you could lose credibility with some of your strongest references.
• Tell the board you intend to change or rotate members over time to gain fresh perspective on personal issues or industry trends.
• Lastly, offer to be on the Board of Directors for your advisors as needed. You will build a business intimacy that will benefit you both over your lifetimes. This is networking at its best.

Fast facts:

1. 70-80% of jobs are filled through referrals and networking where the client is familiar with the reputation of the job applicant before receiving the actual resume. Those resumes are read very differently than the resumes of total strangers. (Read my blog posting The “Hidden Job Market.”)
2. When a hiring manager reviews resumes for people he (or she) has not had referred to him, he reads them looking for cues that will maximize his ROI (return on investment) for the available budget. Therefore, the first applicants to be called for an interview will be closest to an ideal fit. If and only if one of these candidates does not work, will the hiring manager widen the search to applicants who offer a less perfect fit.
3. Hiring managers don’t always put everything they are looking for in the job ad, just the “minimums.” And they usually make the ads broader than the ideal to widen the net and catch more fish in case the ideal candidate does NOT show up in the narrow definition of the specs.
4. A job ad for a JAVA programmer when posted in a big database like www.monster.com will generate 300-400 applicant resumes after about a week. A job ad for a Director of Marketing will generate 25-75 applicants.
5. At least 50% of the people who send a resume to any job posted in a public place will not actually be qualified for the role. Responding to ads for which you are not a close fit is a poor use of your job hunting efforts. It also may annoy a hiring manger who has limited time available.

Are you the best candidate?

You should do homework on what might be important to the client beyond what the job ad says. You can research this through:

• Annual reports
• Informational interviews
• Former employees of that company
• Trade press
• Internet
• Networking
• Reading other jobs ad from the company

If your homework reveals you are a strong candidate, make sure you add content to your resume to demonstrate you are an excellent risk. Instead of applying to 100 companies for which you are a long shot, send tailored resumes to the 15-20 clients where you are most likely to be the preferred candidate.

How to show you are the best applicant

This is done through case histories, testimonials, and details in the resume that show your strategic leadership. If possible, you should show you made the company money, saved the company money, or made it more efficient.

The introduction

70% of hiring managers don’t read beyond the first half of the first page of the resume or spend more than 30 seconds reading before they decide whether or not to opt out. This means that you need a powerful introduction to your resume that makes builds the reader’s expectation that you are a relevant and exciting candidate. This will keep him reading longer so he is more likely to be sold on you.

Beyond the resume

If you think about it, you need to be ready to use similar strategies in networking, cover letters, interviews, in every contact with a potential hiring manager. Your objective is to reinforce repeatedly that you are the best of possible candidates for the job.

But if you have a finance or family in the targeted city, and you rent, you have a better chance of successfully relocating.

• If you have friends or relatives in the new city, and you could stay with them for a short time, put two addresses on your resume. It makes it look like you are easier to move emotionally and physically. Show two phone numbers if possible also.
• An employer may not pay to fly you out there for an interview depending on your salary level and the ease of finding people like you. (Web Designers are easy to find, Marketing Managers with Fortune 100 consumer packaged goods experience are not.) So you may need to organize a lot of interviews around a few trips you pay for. Call recruiters and potential interviewers and tell them you will be there the third weekend of every month from Thursday to Tuesday and can they arrange interviews for you while you will be in town.
• Find recruiting firms that have offices in both cities. The references from the current location recruiter office will make you much more appealing to the remote office (because the local recruiter can verify the quality of your clients and work.) You can look up recruiters in both cities by using the printed Directory of Executive Recruiters published by Kennedy Publishing, Fitzwilliam, NH. You can buy a copy for $40 on www.amazon.com or find it a $300 version of it in a business oriented public library. If you are junior or your title is common in the job databases, you can use www.indeed.com to do the same thing.
• If you frequent a church or temple, go to the elders’ council of the sister church/temple in the new city and network.
• If you belong to a professional association that has chapters in both cities, join the chapter in the new city months before you want to be in the new city and attend some meetings or a regional conference. Network with the Board of Directors. Write an article. Give a speech.
• Look for opportunities to do part-time contract work in the targeted city before you move. Use that employer as a reference to other employers in the new city.
• Look for companies with a large percentage of telecommuters. They will be less threatened in the transition stage.
• Look for companies with hundreds of global offices. Many of my contacts at one employer travel 50-70% of the time anyway and as long as they live near a large airport, the parent company does not care where “home” is.
• Interview current employees of the firm to understand why the potential employer is willing to go to the hassle of importing someone. Sometimes you will uncover problems for the firm with its reputation in the local market.

Selling Yourself to Management

As I said in my last post, as a recruiter, I am not actually seeing any evidence of a Recession outside of the financial industry. However, many of the strategies that protect you in a bad market also improve your status with in a good market.

• Network to keep your value, your brand, visible at all times with your present management and clients. Networking builds bridges to get things accomplished on an every day basis. You should be networking at 2 or 3 title levels above you as insurance if your boss leaves the company. Network with other departments. Network with people junior to you as they may have very different philosophies towards work.
• Look for opportunities to demonstrate how you made (or can make) the company money, saved the company money or made it more efficient. Praise co-workers frequently and tell their bosses. Increase visibility and momentum for your entire team.
• Improve the quality of your written and oral presentation to be a more effective advocate of your ideas. Dress and act more professionally.
• Volunteer to be on committees or projects where you can showcase your thought leadership across the company. Mentor co-workers, help your boss on his/her pet project.
• If you are telecommuter make extra effort to remind teammates you are mission-critical. Be in the office often to build the interpersonal bonds.
• Create opportunities to solicit written feedback on your performance. Send status reports. Ask for signoff on future project methodology. On projects just completed ask your boss if he/she would add anything the next time. The paper trail can be used at review time to remind your boss of the great work you did and, not incidentally, that he/she signed off on your methodology. If you ever lose your job in a large RIF, you have a collection of emails at home you may be able to use to get a job in another department or at least use to find another job. You can use the same method with stakeholders in other departments.
• In a slow or negative economy, especially at a public company, bonuses are easier to negotiate than raises (because bonuses affect the stock price less.) Raises are more likely indexed to company performance and merit bonuses are less wide spread amongst employees. This is not the time to demand a raise or you will leave. This not the best time to be the most expensive person at your band/grade level. This is the time to be more flexible with your employer to give him more room to maneuver and keep you if cuts do happen.

This is one if my favorite networking stories and it shows the power of enlisting family and friends to help.

A man I was counseling, we will call him Max, was on his way to a Hanukkah celebration where there would be 50 family members. He had been out of work for several months, working only part-time as a consultant, and his uncles were asking him whom they could call on his behalf. He was dreading the event because he was imagining aunts pinching him on the cheek and uncles having people call him with leads that would not be a close fit.

He had a problem, you see. He has been a CFO (Chief Financial Officer) for a custom machine shop and few of his relatives were likely to understand exactly what he had been doing for a living. So he called me before the event and asked my advice.

The family and friends resume

We created a half page resume in prose form in “plain English” that explained that a CFO not only makes sure that incoming bills and outgoing invoices are paid by his staff, but also figures out how a company will be able to raise money to build another factory 5 years into the future, etc… He then went on to explain that the custom machine shops he had been associated with did things like replace broken machinery parts that could not longer be bought from the original manufacturer.

On the day of the big event he had 40 copies of the “family resume” but not enough for everyone. His 88 year old Aunt Hattie said “I want one!” several times in a shrill voice and after a while he gave her one reluctantly, figuring he had just wasted a copy.

Aunt Hattie saves the day

The next morning Aunt Hattie calls him up at 6 a.m. and says: “So you are a CFO. That means you… ” She delivered a correct definition of what a CFO does. Then she says: “And Company X is your competitor, right?” Finally, she announced she had been reading the obituaries that morning and the CFO of his largest competitor had just died.

He called me up laughing very hard and asked me for advice. Obviously it would be very inappropriate to call up the company and tell its President: “Hey, I heard your CFO died.” What should he do?

After we spoke he called the President and asked this question: “I am working as a consultant with one of your competitors, Company Z. Would you be interested in sharing resources with us? When we can’t handle a particular job because of a scheduling conflict or because we don’t have the right machinery, we will ask if you can if you can help. And you could do the same in return. Does this interest you?

The moral of the story

The happy ending to the story is that he started work for the other custom machine shop a week later. And the moral of the story is to remember to empower friends and family to help you reach your goals.

If you dread the thought of networking, you are not alone. Most of us can describe networking that is not effective:

Good networking is not a three martini lunch.

Good networking is not standing up in a crowd of strangers and announcing you are a sales manager looking for a contact at company X.

Networking should have two elements:

First, networking should be a long-term campaign to establish your value in the business community. It is about defining and establishing your brand – what makes you unique or different amongst people with somewhat similar backgrounds. It is about building awareness for your brand with an ever-larger audience. It is about keeping your value proposition top of mind over the long-term so that when someone in the community has need of your services, he/she remembers you are out there and reaches out to you. Your objective is to craft your message so that the right listener hears it and is appropriately impressed by it. If you do this well, someone will be eager to reach out to you when there is a problem for which you are the best solution.

The second element of networking is to provide the impetus to get someone to take action on your behalf such as calling someone up about you, or giving you an informational interview. That is easy if the listener understands your value and helping you makes him a hero with his boss. If you are not at that stage of the relationship yet, you can encourage support through quid pro quo. That means you offer to help the other person multiple times until the recipient of your largesse wants to do a favor for you in return. (This is called the Theory of Reciprocity.) In fact we know that the most effective offers of help are (in rank order):

1. Making your listener money or smarter (most effective)
2. Saving him/her money
3. Making him/her more efficient
4. Doing a favor for someone like a family member

My favorite networking activities:

• Discussing ideas of interest to both parties: Reach out to someone who is knowledgeable in your field and tell him/her you are writing a white paper or doing a study on best practices to do ______. An example would be spend time with someone whom is also interested in companies which have grown their businesses by making “green” products, things good for the environment. Tell him/her you will be interviewing a number of people on the subject. If he can give you 30 minutes over a cup of coffee, when you are finished talking to others with the same expertise, you will share back a summary of the conversations. A good professional will be very interested in learning something that makes him smarter or makes him money. Be careful not to share proprietary information or the process may backfire.
• Collect articles from the trade press, internet, and books that show you are up on the cutting-edge issues in your industry. Consider these “currency” with which you can open doors and influence people. Send an article every other month or so to your networking contacts by email. Even if they have already read the article, it establishes that you are knowledgeable and someone to stay in touch with.
• Call someone up on the phone to ask if he/she has heard that Company A bought Company B. You want to vary the methods which you reach out to people to keep it fresh and authentic. A phone call or in-person conversation builds the relationship most effectively. It helps you discover common interests like sports or children. Be careful to stay out of opinionated conversations about politics or religion which may become awkward. You want to build bridges with the listener, not put up barriers.
• Another valuable resource for networking is professional associations. One way to make connections in such an organization is to volunteer (no one will ever turn you down, and you may have the opportunity to create work products and try new directions that will enhance your resume and portfolio). Working side-by-side with people in your industry also helps establish your credibility and credentials while you gain valuable information. Offer to give a speech or write a newsletter article.
• Offer to open up your network of contacts to someone else to solve his/her problem. For instance, offer to help someone find the resource he needs in the professional associations you belong to.
• If you are very junior in rank to the person you are targeting, you still can be of value. I know an executive administrative assistant who offered to research the Internet for information for a Mexican vacation spot for a former boss. In exchange, the boss offered to call a CEO at another company on her behalf.

Now that you have done favors

Once you have established your value it is easier to say “By the way, I am looking for companies in need of a sales executive like me. Do you know any companies looking for someone with those skills? Do you know anyone I might call to ask the same question?” If you do not receive useful information back today, you may in the future. Note that you should not ask that person if HE will pass your name on, you are giving him some wiggle room. If you call on a regular basis to “check in” with good information (ideally 3-6 times a year,) you will develop a life-long exchange of information flow with that contact.

Be sure to add all new contacts to your database. Also keep notes of topics you discussed, when you met, and potential future networking possibilities. Some people set a goal of five or ten new contacts per week. Networking is all about numbers and quality of resources. You need to think of all networking opportunities as steps in a journey that will last for the rest of your life. If you do, you will find that those relationships grow and thrive. The contacts will be as useful when you are working as when you are not.