Three Questions to Consider

To all who find excuses for not contacting every last friend, acquaintance, business associate, and family member-and to you, if you fall into this category, I ask you to consider three questions:

1. Would the person you failed to go to for assistance in your job search be disappointed six months from now if you ran into him or her and told him or her that you had just completed a job search? Most people enjoy being of service to others if they can. It makes them feel good (and powerful) if they can have a positive influence on your career. If you deny them that opportunity, they may actually be hurt by your leaving them out! The concept of being a burden is more in your mind than it is to the people you might approach.
   
2. Would the people you don't plan to contact in your own job search include you on their list of friends and associates to contact if they, themselves, were out of work, and were engaged in a tough job search? If these acquaintances have any common sense at all, even if they didn't know you well, or hadn't seen you in a good long while, they'd contact you for names of people you know who might be in a position to lead them to a job opening. They'd be crazy not to! And, if that's the case, why in heaven's name wouldn't you contact them at a time when you need some help? (You never know, the people who you thought might not want to help you might be glad to be of help just in case, at some future date, they might need some help themselves!)
   
3. Which would you prefer: halving your chance of finding a job that's right for you, or girding your loins and contacting those acquaintances whom you really didn't plan on involving in your job search? Since for most job seekers, friends and acquaintances are the key to one out of every two jobs, if you fail to contact even one acquaintance, you might, in fact, cut your opportunities in half! And that doesn't make any sense at all.
   
   
   

By now, I hope you're convinced to mount an intensive networking campaign-to contact every friend, associate, acquaintance, and relative you can think of as part of your job search. But you might still worry that you really don't know very many people. That could be a legitimate concern; I've worked with many a job seeker who couldn't develop a list of more than a dozen or so people to contact. The secret to creating a large friends list is not to limit yourself to people you are sure have the contacts you need to get you a job, but rather to approach every acquaintance whether he or she is in your field or not. After all, it's unlikely that you know all the people each of the people in your network know. So your next door neighbor who is a plumbing contractor just might have a cousin who is in the same field you are. Or your father-in-law might play cards with someone whose boyhood friend is in the same kind of business as you are. The point is, you just can't limit your list to people you know in your business or profession because if you do, you could be missing a genuine entry to someone who is.

"Whom should I include in my network of friends and acquaintances to contact about my job search?" you ask. The list is not intended to be conclusive; but it should get you started. In our classes, we ask everyone to think of the actual number of people in each category (without regard for how well they know them). You might like to do the same. You might surprise yourself with the number of potential lead sources you can approach with your networking campaign.

We often discover individuals in our outplacement groups who can develop lists of more than five hundred persons to contact during their job searches. On average, this little exercise helps job seekers like yourself develop a preliminary network of close to one hundred people-all of whom could potentially lead you to your next job.

If you took a couple of minutes to guesstimate the number of people in each category in the list, hopefully you, too, were pleasantly surprised at the total number of people you could talk to about your job search campaign. If you stop to consider the acquaintances each of your friends have whom you don't know, the power of networking becomes obvious! Even if only one-in-four people on your list help you network to just one person who may know of a position that needs to be filled, your list has to be one of the most important tools in your job search kit.

If you can't build a substantial initial network list, keep this thought in mind: Your address book, business-card file, and out-of-date appointment book are great sources of contacts. The best of us forget some of the people we've met along the way. If you keep old date books (or appointment books) you're bound to turn up a business acquaintance you'd forgotten about. And he or she may be just the one who knows of the job you want.