How important is networking to finding your next job?  How do you successfully network?  What do you NOT do when you network?

Ken Lazar, Principal/Professional Recruiter at Ability Professional Network, and Co-Founder of the Sales Connection, an Association for Sales Professionals, join us in this episode to go in-depth on the what's, how's and why's on networking to find your next job.

 

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Brett: How do you define networking?

Ken: Networking, years ago, was making friends, making acquaintances and broadening your relationships with other people. In your job search, it is now a mandatory function of your strategy. The majority of people find their next job through a friend, or through an acquaintance, or through an acquaintance of an acquaintance. Through networking is where you find your next job. The problem is, finding your next job through networking is the hardest thing to do. But people have a hard time understanding how important networking can be. A lot of people are just scared to death to go into a room with other people. There are a lot of things that you can do to prepare for an event, or prepare for a professional event, that would put you at ease/

Carol: One of the hardest comments I ever had to hear from a client was when she said she was not going to beg somebody for a job. That was her definition of networking. And to turn that around for that individual was not easy.

Ken: What did you tell that lady?

Carol: We had to really turn the conversation around and stop looking at networking as the answer to all of her job searching needs, and to think of it more as a step in the process of job searching, where the real value of networking is information gathering. That she could get information from people that would help her in her job search that had nothing to do with asking for a job.

Ken: I always find that somebody who is sitting in front of their computer eight hours a day is not going to find a job. I recently read a statistic that stated the odds of finding a job online right now is the same as stepping on a golf course at the first hole and getting a hole in one before the end of the round. It's difficult to find jobs online, even though there are the highest number of jobs online right now that we've had since the recession.

Carol: So the last statistic I came across was that half of the available jobs out there are still not posted anywhere.

Ken: At one of our job networking groups, and we had a vice president of human resources at the meeting. He was from Cardinal Health. And one of the people in the meeting mentioned they see an awful lot of jobs at Cardinal Health posted online, and that person was not getting very many responses from applying to those posted positions. He stated that 85 percent of those jobs are filled internally. That's what happens in a lot of major corporations.

Brett: That leads me to the next question. Why is networking is so important?

Ken: I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point, which has one chapter on networking. In it, he talks about a Harvard professor who did a study on how people found jobs. And he found out that people did not find their jobs through their strong ties,...