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The “First Wave” of Networking Activity

fourth-of-july-fly-overFirst and foremost, enjoy the long Holiday weekend!  Our freedom has never been free, nor has our independence been shaken.

Your Career Compass

Job search does not happen in a digital vacuum.

I have long suggested that steps one and two of our 12-step Process M.A.P. give us all the ingredients we need to “get in the galley” and cook up a three course meal of our personal marketing collateral materials.  Most job seekers seem to prefer starting with a resume, so that they can begin simply applying to any job that seems remotely close to what they can do…

Thursday, July 7th… Implementing your PMP: The ‘First Wave’ and beyond

Pilot OnboardI encourage you to work with all your ingredients at the same time…if your desired result is a nice prime rib dinner, don’t start with the meat—start with the seasonings and vegetables, even get your dessert started…

Because that “meaty” resume is the easiest and quickest of what you need to prepare!

So…job seeking ‘chefs,’ let’s look at the ingredients that you have identified through assessment of your galley shelves, and your dinner of choice.

You have learned in earlier sessions that the key to the whole notion of productive and efficient networking is to generate INTERACTIVE communication, the initial basis of relationship building!  When involved with active job search, part of our preparation is to develop our set of Personal Marketing collateral materials, the vehicles by which we deliver our “story.”   We season our job search performance by building confidence in that story through practice and research.

Ah, and finally our just desserts… the CAREER pay-off is the network we build through the focus of targeting and the management of our contacts.

Networking is a contact sport!

The ‘FIRST Wave’

Your purpose in this ‘first wave’ of networking is to gain information, advice, and most importantly names of other individuals you can call.  You can create INTERACTIVE communication with NO rejection!  The lifeline of networking is to always get more ‘contacts.’ So, be sure to ask each person if they have a minute to talk to you, and when finished talking thank them for their time.

Make networking calls in a block of time. Each call is more comfortable than the one before. Do not call people and ask them if they have any openings at their company… This is almost always totally non-productive.  By starting with people you already know, or have a reason to know, you will be gaining confidence with every conversation!

THE PRINCIPLES BEHIND A SUCCESSFUL JOB SEARCH ARE ALWAYS THE SAME: the search process itself is time consuming work, and the more productive time you spend on your job search the more interviews and job offers you will generate.

So the question at this point is “Where do you find out about job openings and on which avenues of job search should you spend the most time?”

 THE BEST (And Worst) OF BOTH WORLDS

Technology has done a terrific job of consolidating posted job leads. Web crawling software can reach out and consolidate classified ads, recruitment posts and company posted job opportunities. We know these consolidated sites as Internet Job Banks… and some of them contain a huge amount of postings.

Unfortunately, their very size makes it challenging to stay current and eliminate redundancy. Also unfortunate is the fact that these very same job banks have consolidated your competition and rejection from Corporate America. This is not even mentioning that Corporate America is also missing it’s goal of better qualified resumes to fuel its recruitment effort… they’re simply getting MORE resumes to process!

Solution? Use the Job Banks to generate your most attractive leads, then network your way into those targeted organizations.  This is getting the most from your use of technology instead of being abused by it!

 

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Your “Digital Footprint”

Compass-seaLHow can one accomplish this critical element of your Personal Marketing Plan, your ‘digital footprint?’  Use the time you spend on LinkedIn to address your two critical tasks:

1.   Task #1 is to keep your profile as a dynamic reflection of what you learn from your networking experience, tweaking your way to better search page results.  This is worth more time in the beginning of your career transition, but regular time throughout.

2.   Task#2 is to be interactive by participating in appropriate Group discussions, ‘like-ing’ comments of your choice, private messaging the writers of those comments as potential new contacts, following targeted Companies, and regularly ‘updating your network by ‘share-ing’ articles or posting brief ‘white papers’ than express your knowledge and expertise.

TASK#1: Your Profile

Your LinkedIn Profile can be your optimal DIGITAL aid to networking.  You can ‘design’ your Profile to draw interested parties TO YOU… this is called a ‘pull marketing’ effort and is heavily dependent on your search engine optimization (SEO) score.  This is an over-simplification, but the name of that game is to find creative ways to stack your keywords, using every allowable boundary of LinkedIn.

The challenge is to create this heavy barrage of keywords in a less than obvious manner, so that your Profile is still reader-friendly to those potential contacts, recruiters, or hiring authorities.

On the other hand, you may elect to use your Profile to get your story out to potential interested contacts, recruiters, or hiring authorities.  This would be utilizing a ‘push marketing’ design and would integrate a more narrative approach, with all due grammar in place…making it much more reader-friendly.

The challenge is to create such a narrative ‘storyline’ which has sufficiently high SEO score to rank you in the first several pages of a keyword search, AND…

…AND narrative enough to be appealing to the actual reader of your profile.

I encourage the Candidates that I serve to get the best of BOTH marketing approaches—both push and pull marketing strategies.  Remember, the LinkedIn search algorithm looks for your activity level FIRST and your SEO score SECOND (a close second)… so let your desired results be your guide.

While your page will detail your work history, don’t assume you can copy and paste your resume and be done with it. Your profile page should reflect your professional interests, passions, and ambitions at this point in your career.

It’s not a mistake to start with cutting and pasting from your resume.   It becomes the core of this high tech, written ‘personal marketing’ collateral. But then edit your storyline and put personality back in to it.

TASK#2: Developing YOUR Network

Goal: Continue to gain benefits from your social network — without making it your full-time job.  Don’t expect that you can post something (TASK#1) one time and get ongoing benefits.    Rather, you’ll need to continually update and refine your profile and your network. The most obvious way to do this is to add new contacts.

When I come home from a conference, for example, I go through the business cards I’ve collected to see who’s on LinkedIn.

Adding new contacts, sometimes from outside your immediate field or industry, is also a subtly persuasive way to sell yourself by letting others see how far your professional sphere extends.

I encourage job seekers to reach out to contacts even when you don’t have a business concern.  I try to touch base with a few contacts every week for no other reason than to check in and see how things are going.

TASK#3: Job Lead Development

 

 

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Welcome Aboard!

Welcome to DFWCareerpilot.  This portal serves as the communication hub for a FREE, WEEKLY Career Transition Event held at The Egg and I Restaurant in Addison, TX… every Thursday morning at 9 AM.

THIS WEEK’s Presentation is on job search implementation issues.  It is based on the consistent execution of a person’s Personal Marketing Plan.  It will provide several models to create a consistent set of activities meant to accelerate one’s productivity and efficiency during active search.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

  1. Professionals who seek a good fit in their next employment… a Career FIT!
  2. Job seekers who are frustrated by today’s soft job market
  3. Those frustrated by  lengthy unemployment, experiencing little success, or even focus to their efforts
  4. Employed, or UNDER-employed individuals who seek to identify appropriate ‘next steps’