Meetings produce much more information and provide many more opportunities. In the course of a face-to-face discussion, names of people and organizations come out in a way that just does not happen when you are talking on the telephone. So do all sorts of ideas and suggestions.
More often than not, network contacts prefer a meeting too. There is very little difference in the time taken up by a short meeting and a long phone call. What is more, you may telephone just when the contact is trying to complete a task to a tight deadline, is in a hurry to leave the office for an important appointment or is being interrupted every couple of minutes. A meeting can be scheduled for a more convenient, and quieter, time. An additional consideration when your network contacts are people to whom you have been referred, and who have never met you, is that they may be unwilling to provide you with further referrals until they have met you in the flesh.
The only real disadvantage of meetings is that they take up more of your time, because you have to travel to and from the place where the meeting takes place. Wherever possible, therefore, arrange more than one meeting in the same town or city on the same day - but not so many that you arrive late, get flustered or fail to find time both to run over your agenda before each meeting and to make notes after each one.
Sometimes, of course, you will have no option but to settle for telephone conversations, either because the contacts insist on handling it that way or because they are so far away that it would be too time consuming, and expensive, to go to see them. You can still get quite a lot out of a phone call, so long as you prepare yourself thoroughly.
Before You Call
The planning you do before a telephone call needs to take into account the fact that you can never know in advance whether you will succeed in arranging a face-to-face meeting or whether that call is going to be the only chance you will get to achieve your objectives with that particular network contact. Therefore, while you always ask for a meeting, you must have to hand a clear list of what you want from the person you are calling. This could include:
- advice about the direction and development of your career;
- information regarding specific industries or companies;
- referrals to further network contacts, in which case you need
- addresses
- telephone numbers
- best times and methods of contacting them
-as much as possible about them, their organization and their business sector
- whether you may use the referee's name as a door opener.
Having clarified your objectives, you can then decide how you are going to lead into them. If you are currently in work you can adopt an oblique approach, using an (ostensibly) genuine business motive for the call. If you are unemployed you need to be more direct.
The opening will depend on whether you are calling someone you already know or whether it is a referral who will probably not even know your name. In the first case you can lead in with something of a social nature, and may well exchange a few pleasantries and catch up on each other's general news before moving on to the purpose of your call. In the second, you make immediate mention of the name of the door opener, assuming that you have permission to do so, then carry straight on to explain why you are calling. If you cannot use the name of your original contact, you will have to say something like, 'I am calling you because I understand that you are an expert on . . .'
Since the people you are calling will almost certainly have many demands on their time, it is vital that you do not waste it. An opening which respects that situation might go something like this:
My name is Jill Brown. Carol Clark suggested I call you because I am considering developing my career within the country hotels sector. Carol said that you know more about that business than anyone she has ever met, and that you might be able to give me some advice and perhaps a few further contacts. Could you please spare a quarter of an hour or so at some point for me to come and see you?
Only 15 minutes? Yes, that is all you ask for - though in practice you will probably get more like 30 since most people organize their diaries in half-hour slots. The important point is to avoid the classic howler committed by one outplacement candidate. Here is the lament which she poured out to her counselor at a review meeting.
I'm not getting very far with this networking business. I've been doing everything you said - prioritizing my contacts, defining my objectives, planning a snappy opening to each call - but when I ask if I can pop in to see them for an hour or so, they all seem to have their diaries fully booked for the next month or more!
As I was saying, do respect the fact that, for busy people, time is at a premium.
Making the Most of the Meeting
Given that your meeting will probably last no more than half an hour, you need to prepare carefully in order to make the most of it. Beware, however, of people who advise you to plan for your meetings by writing out a rigid script, geared to a single objective. Networking meetings are fluid, two-way affairs. While you do need to control them, you must do so with a light hand, not a heavy one. Unless you are flexible, you will and yourself constantly failing to capitalize on the true value of the contact and at times missing out on absolutely golden opportunities.
But how can you plan to be flexible? Is that not a contradiction in terms? Not at all - though what it does mean is that you have to work that bit harder.
The starting point is research. If you are going to see someone you have met before, you should know a reasonable amount about them and the organization they work for or represent. If you have not met, but have been given an introduction by someone else, then you should have obtained similar information from the person who provided the referral. Do not stop there, though. Bearing in mind the business sectors of which your contact has knowledge, and the various pies he or she has a finger in, jot down all the ways in which that individual may be able to help you, either with advice, or information, or contacts.
The next stage is to give careful thought to the questions you are going to use in order to obtain that help. The quality of what you get from your contact will depend, more than anything else, on the quality of the questions you ask. They are the most effective tools you can possibly use in your job search.
What is more, many of the people you meet will base their evaluation of you on how thoroughly you have prepared for the meeting and how well thought out your questions are. The better the opinion they form of you, the more willing they will be to provide you with further referrals and to allow their own name to be used by way of introduction.
When it comes to introductions, do not fall into the error of setting your sights too low. If you ask up front, your contact may be willing to set up meetings for you with his or her referrals, or occasionally even to take you along to introduce you personally. Not all contacts will be prepared to go that far, of course, but others may be willing to forward your CV, accompanied by-a personal letter or preceded by a telephone call. Any of these options will open the door more readily than you will be able to do by calling up yourself and using the contacts name or, worse still, just being given the referral without permission to use the referee's name. Remember the old maxim: 'If you don't ask, you don't get,'
Having done your research and devised your questions, you are now in a position to add the third leg to the preparation tripod. This is a careful selection of the USPs you have to offer, the selection being made on the basis of those qualifications, skills, fields of experience, personal strengths and, above all, achievements, which relate most directly to the areas highlighted by your research and covered by your questions. These should be listed out in full, and then you should incorporate those that are particularly highly relevant into a freshly edited version of your CV which you will give to your contact at an appropriate point in the meeting.
Managing the Meeting
Although your aim should be to allow sufficient flexibility to take advantage of ideas and suggestions, emanating from your contact, you nevertheless need to control the tenor and direction of the meeting, albeit unobtrusively.
To get it off on the right foot, establish rapport. This should present few problems with people you already know. With referrals, break the ice and relax them by using one or two open questions, based on your research, to get them talking about their organization and the issues facing the sector in which they operate.
Most people will be only too eager to help you, but they may not know how to do so. They will often ask what they can do for you. This is where you need to be ready to pick up the baton, giving a succinct (because you have rehearsed well) summary of your career, your current situation and, in particular, what you have to offer, and then explaining what you are looking for - advice, information etc.
It is at this stage that things start to get interesting. Your mind needs to be working overtime as you absorb everything your contact says. Juggling priorities with the speed and dexterity of a multi-programming computer, you pursue the most useful avenues with pertinent questions, ensuring that you make notes of everything that is going to be of value to you.
Finally, before thanking your contact for being so helpful, do make sure that you have not only got your three or four further referrals, but also as much information about them as possible. If you are to continue to develop your network, rather than letting it run down, you must never leave without those new names. Never? Well, there are just a couple of exceptions.
Windows of Opportunity
As you read these words, a line manager somewhere is mulling over some initial thoughts about the creation of a new post. Somewhere else, a proposed vacancy has reached the next stage: a job description and person specification is being prepared. In yet another organization, a divisional director is reviewing a job/person spec to decide whether to approve the addition to headcount. In a further company, they are running through possible internal candidates to see whether a vacancy which has been approved can be filled without the time and expense involved in advertising, or paying a fee to an agency or to a headhunted
Actually, all of these events are occurring not just once but hundreds of times over every single day. And it is not just a question of new jobs. There are also those which have to be filled because someone has retired, or been promoted, transferred or fired. The problem is that each of these vacancies is known only to a very small number of people.
Or is it a problem? If you were one of those people, would it not be a distinct advantage? And, of course, through networking you can be. The more networking contacts you make, the more of these small circles of people who are in the know you stand a chance of penetrating. Usually you get in when someone you have already networked gets back to you with the lead, but just occasionally you may have the luck to be told about such an opportunity during the course of a networking meeting. How occasionally depends on how hard you work at making your own luck by working hard at preparing for, and managing, your meetings.
When such an opportunity does come up, you can be excused for not requesting further referrals. Indeed, if the position really interests you, it might be diplomatic not to cast doubts on your commitment by making it too obvious that you are continuing to seek out other opportunities - although, if you are wise, you will go on doing so right up to the time that the one you really want is securely in the bag.
The only other occasion on which you neglect to seek additional referrals is when, in the course of a meeting, your contact raises the possibility of creating a job for you. This golden opportunity - a job for which there is no competition and which is tailored exactly to your talents and interests - is even less a matter of pot luck than the previous example. You will have planted the seed in your contact's mind by identifying problems or needs within the organization and by showing how you could be the ideal solution to them.
After the Meeting
Where a specific vacancy has been identified, the next step will almost certainly be a further meeting. In all other cases, a different course of action needs to be followed.
The most urgent requirement is to follow up any leads you have been given. If, for example, a contact has gone to the trouble of getting in touch with a referral to herald your call, you will not be very popular if he or she finds out, a week or two later, that you have done nothing about it. You need expect no more help from that source.
Equally urgent is the need to observe common courtesy. Whenever someone has given you their time, always write within a day or two to thank them. Furthermore, do not neglect to give them subsequent feedback on the progress of any leads they have fed to you.
Thirdly, do your paperwork. Before you make your first networking call, it is essential to set up a simple but effective system to keep track of all the names on your ever expanding list and of every contact you have with each of them. A chore it may seem, but duck it and you will land yourself in the most unholy mess imaginable.
All you need is a record for each contact showing:
- name
- title
- organization
- contact address
- contact telephone number(s)
- source
- date called/met
- referrals
- other action
- follow-ups
- notes.
These records can be kept either on a computer or on record cards filed in a box. Computers have the advantage of enabling you to sort the records in a variety of different ways, e.g. alphabetically, geographically or by business sector. Whichever method you use, be sure not only to include a facility to cross-reference records, but also to keep that cross-referencing up to date.
Performance Targets
In order to motivate yourself, you need to set yourself targets. If these are to be effective, they need to stretch you a bit but they must not be so impossible that you do not consider it even worth trying to meet them. One job search book - admittedly it was an American one - suggested that you aim for 10-20 meetings a week. Assuming a five-day week, that is as many as four meetings a day! How you would even get to that many, given the time spent not only in the meeting but also in travelling to and from each location - let alone make the calls that generate them, prepare for them and take all the post-meeting action - is something of a mystery. And that is without spending any time at all on other job hunting activities such as advertised vacancies, headhunters and agencies, speculative applications and so on.
Assuming that networking accounts for at least 60 per cent of executive vacancies, people who are unemployed and therefore working full time at finding a new job should be spending three days a week on this aspect of their search. Since that includes all aspects of networking, three or four face-to-face meetings a week would be reasonable and six pretty good, allowing for the fact that there will, in addition, be some 'meetings' that take place on the telephone.
For those in employment the numbers may vary in proportion to the amount of scope for external contact afforded by their job, but many may be able to achieve similar volumes, given that their networking is being piggy-backed onto normal business contacts.
As with so many other aspects of the job search, however, it is not so much quantity as quality that really matters. The true measures of that are the volumes of worthwhile job opportunities that you generate and the time it takes you to get an acceptable offer for a position you definitely want.
"Some people get jobs as a result of bulk mailings. So, too, do some people win the National Lottery?"
