Personal Contacts
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Creating an action plan, your Personal Market Plan during career transition, will reap rewards during your implementation campaign. Success in market plan implementation, your job search campaign, takes the randomness out of job search and provides:
Using a "shotgun approach," or papering the world with your resume will simply scatter your time and energy. Rather, focus your networking efforts to increase your productivity. A well conceived Personal Market Plan helps you to manage your time to get the best results for your efforts. Networking through personal contacts is the first method/ pathway directed toward seeking your next right work... for the rest of your career. In the marketing metaphor, these five methods would be your "distribution channels."
Networking for word-of-mouth advice and referrals is a technique that has been used for hundreds of years. It is a powerful way to expand your career options by developing relationships and alliances with other professionals. Building a network is a vital part of today’s strategic career development. Each planned contact can lead to others if you ask the right questions and explore the possibilities. Its important that you view networking is a two-way street—sometimes with you, the information seeker, being able to provide information to the same person from whom you are seeking it—and at other times being a source of information to other people. In order to get information from others, we must be a good source of information. All it takes is being willing to share information, ideas and resources. To put it another way, "What goes around, comes around." GETTING THE WORD OUT AND EXPLORATION A network is not something you establish overnight. It requires a lot of work and time, but the rewards are incalculable. In the career transition mode, if you do not have a good network already in place, there are several ways you can begin to build one starting with your existing personal contacts. Why build premature rejection by directly inquiring about JOBS? Career management experts and veteran job seekers promote networking as the single most effective method of obtaining your next right work. Networking is the on-going process of letting people know about your situation and obtaining industry information leading to job leads from personal contacts. Networking does not involve asking anyone for a job. As the term "networking" indicates, your goal is to continually build an ever-widening network that ultimately reaches within your industry specific, set of target organizations, until you unearth employer needs and/or positions. With each networking contact who provides you with information and names of other contacts, your visibility and news of your availability grows. Networking succeeds for a number of reasons. First, most existing available jobs on any given day are not known to a public audience. Job openings or newly created positions still in the planning stages are known to individuals within an organization anywhere from several weeks to several months before they are advertised or made public to those on the outside. Networking can bring you face-to-face with these "insiders" and with these unadvertised positions before anyone else learns of them. Second, many employers prefer to hire someone they know personally or hire someone who has been referred to them by a mutual acquaintance. Familiarity and referrals reduce much of the uncertainty involved in hiring a new employee. THE IMPORTANCE OF PEOPLE Without question, job searching is a process of calling people, meeting people and interacting with people. Written documents cannot
Only PEOPLE can do those things! HIGH TECH - HIGH TOUCH It is tempting, in our age of electronic communication with e-mailing and voice mailing and relaying information rapidly to one another, to want to over-rely on electronic job searching activities. As we said earlier, job seeking is the business of developing relationships with others. Career Continuation is a Contact Sport! Your contacts will invest more in you when you have gone to some effort. Meet with people in person. Go to their office. Go to their home. Be visible to your contacts—you will be more memorable to them. Whenever possible, network in person, setting a goal of two in-person meetings a day. Begin the process of networking by listing your personal contacts. Strive for a list of 30 to 50 individuals for starters. Few people you know will be able to hire you, but they will know people who will know people who will lead you to hiring opportunities. Your initial Personal Contact List may include contacts from the following categories:
You may be surprised to experience that the most far-fetched tips and your most unexpectedly helpful contacts turn out to become your best leads. Don't censor or second guess any job leads; follow up on them all. There’s no way to predict which leads will prove most valuable and whose information will bring you face-to-face with the decision maker who hires you.
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Personal Contacts | Information Network | Target Firms | Internet | Recruitment Firms |
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