Ineffective Networking Is Ruining Your Job Search

Did you ever get a question about job openings at your company? It hurts to say “sorry” to these people, and it’s embarrassing for them to ask. Networking for job openings is ineffective.

It was fine when you were just starting out in your career. Jack got his high school stock boy job through the help of a friend’s father, and Steve got a job waiting tables by walking in and asking if they needed help. However, this is only applicable to entry-level positions. Once you’ve decided on a career path, it’s unlikely that your friends and acquaintances will know who to talk to.

Please don’t get us wrong. Person-to-person job searching is unquestionably the best method! It’s just that most people believe networking works on its own. They’ll go to association meetings (which are usually made up of 90% job-hunters and want tobes and 10% doers) and ask about vacancies or openings. They’ll hand out their resumes like flyers on the street. They’ll hoard business cards like baseball cards and wish they had a legitimate reason to talk to those people. They hope to be remembered if a vacancy or opening arises.

Then there’s networking with your “primary” contacts. Friends, relatives, and acquaintances don’t like being imposed on; besides, asking everyone you know about jobs is a gamble. Instead of cultivating your network, you can quickly deplete it.

To avoid this haphazard, billiard-ball-style networking, you must have a written and researched plan of who you want to talk to, how you can make or save them money, what’s going on in their industry that you can key into, and a well-thought-out rationale and method to get in to see them face to face. Each meeting must have a clear agenda. You must be able to milk the meeting for additional contacts by knowing—at least by key information point if not by name—who else you want to speak with.

Remember that your resume is unlikely to entice anyone to meet with you. You’ll need good phone techniques (including knowing the three ways to reach impossible-to-reach people), a brief and powerful personal profile to sell your future, and you’ll need to avoid the common mistakes that kill job campaigns to generate networking interviews. These include being “open” to any type of job; conducting an impromptu, unfocused search; and going it alone. You’ll need the encouragement and support of friends and family to get you through the difficult times—and don’t be afraid to seek professional help to help you overcome your limiting beliefs.

Poor networking is worse than none at all. Meeting new people is one thing; making the right impression is quite another. Meeting and conversing with a large number of people does not necessarily imply that you are getting closer to a new job. If people aren’t impressed, if they think you’re too arrogant, too pushy, too meek, too timid, too uninformed, not committed enough, too confused, too anything, a hundred networking contacts will only generate a hundred bad impressions—bridges you’ll have to rebuild later once you get your head on straight.

One client was overjoyed because he “knew everybody” in his industry. When we ran a thorough reference check, we discovered that he was, indeed, well-known. But he wasn’t just famous; he was notorious! He had to toughen up in a variety of ways, including revisiting everyone he knew and revising the impression he’d made.

You may not be able to repair the damage in some cases. A first impression is something you never get a second chance to make. Poorly conducted or ill-prepared networking will always make matters worse.