Last week I sat down with a senior marketing professional who had just completed an executive MBA program. She was frustrated by all the flaky people in her network who were “preventing” her from scoring interviews at companies she desperately wanted to work at. This woman had all the right stuff, but she was getting stonewalled by contacts who over-promised and under-delivered when it came to hooking her up with employees they knew at these companies. She was starting to get jaded: networking was a joke, she thought. She never considered for a second that it might something she was doing that was holding her back.
After we’d talked a bit, she told me that she didn’t know her so-called network very well: they couldn’t vouch for her experience or her work ethic, or say what she was best in the world at. She was spending the majority of time she had allocated to networking by trolling LinkedIn—trying to use contacts she didn’t know very well to get to people that they didn’t know very well. And most importantly, she had regularly and systematically broken the cardinal rule of networking: she’d been reaching out and asking for favors before she had earned the trust of the people in her network. Folks, networking isn’t a turnkey operation by a long shot. It’s hard, time-consuming, and something you need to practice daily for it to pan out for you. In fact, it’s pretty easy to suck at it.
In this candidate’s case, I recommended a complete shift in perspective. First she needed to stop asking for connections to second and third degrees of separation via LinkedIn to people she didn’t know very well—she just looked clueless. I then suggested that she immediately stop asking for favors and start doing them for others—for one month straight. It was time to turn on the “giving gene” in her brain. She also needed to slow down and get focused on making a bigger impact with her networking. The month could also be used for brainstorming ways to make it easier for the people in her network to publicize her to others by giving them tailored pitches. That way, everyone’s star power could rise with the right introductions.
Despite what you may have read, networking isn’t a magic charm that will immediately get you the job of your dreams and let you live happily ever after. But if it’s done right and done consistently, it will definitely put you on the right track—and also help you bring your trusted contacts along for the ride.
Got your own suggestion for our marketing maven who wants to put her MBA to good use? Share it here, along with any “pay it forward” networking tips you like to use.
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