In accordance with our career guru Richard N. Bolles, there are two fundamental truths about the Job Market:

1. There are always jobs out there – people get sick, retire, fired, injured etc even in the worst of recession times
2. Whether you find jobs or not depends on YOU – your perseverance and what methods of job hunting you are using.

There are only 15 % of  advertised  jobs, and 85 % are hidden because they are got filled before being advertised. #1 way to access this type of jobs is Networking.  However,people  prone to spend most of their time on responding to newspapers’ and on-line  job postings, which is 10-12 times less effective than networking techniques.

What is Networking?

By definition, Networking is your formal and informal interconnections with other people. it can be personal – with friends, family and others you meet in an informal gatherings; it can be professional or business oriented – relationships you develop with co-workers, clients, vendors and so on.

We, as humans, always lived in networks. Via family connections, friendship ties, and work relationships, we are interconnected to hundreds or even thousands of specific people, most of whom we do not even know. We affect them, and they affect us.

A recent discovery, made by social scientists at Harvard, confirms that the more connected we are to others, the more happy we become. Look at this model, which represents a local community connections. Each dot represents individual – the yellow ones are happy, and usually lie at the core of the network, connected to many other dots. The blue ones are unhappy and lie at the branches of the human net, barely connected to anyone else. Thus, networking is not just useful tool for our job hunting, but it also affects our active living, health and longevity!

It is also important to understand that Networking alone does not guarantee you a job! There are several keys to successful employment such as career exploration and planning, labour market research, portfolio building, resume and cover letter writing, and finally preparing for an interview.

Another important factor about networking is putting yourself in the employer’s frame of mind. Many of us hunt for jobs in the exact opposite ways from the employers. Employers prefer to fill a vacancy from within, with someone, whose work they have seen already. The next way will be using their best friends or business colleagues as references. Only if these two ways do not work, the employers will pay to an agency they trust for finding them a prospective candidate, or will place an ad on-line or  in newspapers (RichardN. Bolles, What Color is your parachute?) Instead of spending most of our time applying to advertised positions, or seeking help of various job agencies, we can take a shortcut and get in contact with our prospective employers through  networking  in the shortest time possible.

What makes the networking effective?

Networking as a part of the whole job search process is effective only if we apply holistic approach to its strategy – will take time for an extensive homework on ourselves and our labour market: Who we are,  whats out there,and how we can get there! Only when we develop a clear career objective/goal, build  a strong professional portfolio, take time for self-management techniques (job search is a full-time job), work on our  self-image, life-work balance and at the same time improve on our  communication skills, including telephone/on-line/e-mail etiquette,  only then we can count on successful networking .

Networking is helping to generate new job leads and contact employers. How do we we do it? The answer is simple – we constantly meet and communicate with people!

There are various places, events and groups of people, useful for generating information about new job openings:

1. Job finding clubs, Employment Resource Centers
2. Job fairs
3. Professional meetings, conferences
4. Volunteering
5. Former colleagues
6. Members of social clubs/groups
7. Extended family
8. Friends
9. Neighbours
10. Social Media network (Facebook, Linkedin and others)

How do we network?

This simplified model represents how networking can help you get in contact with your prospective employer. You communicate your job objective to the people you know, and in turn, they discover additional connections, or “bridges”to the contacts that can hire you. You should speak with as many people as you can – friends, colleagues, professional association members – as you never know who they know and where the opportunities lie.

The most popular type of networking today is an on-line networking through various social media such as Linkedin, Facebook, Youtube and many more others. The on-line networking model is the same as a regular human-to-human networking. However, it offers you additional ways of approach because it offers access to all the degrees of connections simultaneously. You can see and analyze your whole network, which growth exponentially,  reach out to direct connections, request an introduction through a first degree connections. Moreover, on-lie networking has many additional advantages:

1. Organized business e-mail address book
2. Constantly upgraded  on-line resume
3. Additional opportunities to market yourself through various brochures, broadcasting, own web-sites and blogging
4. Multidimensional job research tool
5. If you look at the World map of social networks you can clearly see that your reach is Global!

Before I finish, I would like to leave you with this image.

This is a map of all the friends’ connections on Facebook. As you can see the whole World is one giant network. Imagine how tremendous an advantage you can get, if you utilize the power of this network in your job search and life.

To discover how Social Media tools can help you to get a job offer, look up for the next Social Media presentation.