How to Use Your Network to Get a Job
Searching for a job is hard work. It is made even harder in the current climate where recruitment freezes, redundancies and failing companies are an unfortunate fact of life. But there are still companies making a profit or positioning themselves to do well when the market picks up, and through them there are still jobs available.
If you want to get a job then you have to try find one through numerous channels, and one of the most important is your network. Lets examine the best methods available for you to go about it.
First and foremost, are you on LinkedIn, the professional networking site? If not get on it now, creating a profile and linking with friends and colleagues is free, and it gives you a great resource to find companies and to get yourself found.
You are able to put together a basic resume as your profile page, which is important to allow people using LinkedIn to recruit (which is a large number of companies and recruiters) to find you using key word searches. It will also be important for linking to later on, so make sure that you complete your profile as if it were your resume.
Now if you already have a profile you will either have contacts on it or you will have contacts you already know who you can find by using the search function. The first stage is to get in touch with them and let you know that you are looking for a job and see if they know any companies that are recruiting.
Now look at the job page on LinkedIn, it works the same as most other recruiting sites. Any jobs there that look suitable? If so apply for them.
Once you have done that take another look at colleagues profiles. Where have they worked that use people with your sort of skills? By looking at the companies you can then find them online using Google or your search engine of choice. Most companies will have a careers page on their website but may not advertise elsewhere, take a look and see if you can find anything there.
Myspace and Facebook
Although other networking sites may not have the professional use of LinkedIn places like Myspace or Facebook are more likely to have a couple of hundred people you know on them. So make sure that you go through all your friends, family and contacts on them.
Ask them to ask their friends and co-workers as well, they may well have some knowledge your immediate contacts don’t. And make sure to send them a link to your Linkedin profile, it may be that a basic asking doesn’t work, but a list of your skills and accomplishments might interest contacts more.
Use Facebook to start a group about you looking for work, and invite everybody you know, and get them to invite others and keep going. Use it to highlight some of your skills and put a link in it to your LinkedIn page again, you can get your job search going ‘viral’ and someone will eventually know something that will get you a job.
Go Through Your Phone Book
The fact is that not everyone is on social networking sites so if you want your job search to hit as many people as possible you are going to have to get on the phone and make some calls. Call through your list, even if you contacted them on social networking sites. A call is a lot more personal than a message on the likes of LinkedIn or Facebook and may well jog their memory better than their spending a few seconds reading a message before they hit the delete key.
Don’t just call the likely subjects, other contacts may know someone or have departments in other parts of their companies who are looking for work.
If you are emailing your contact list remember to include a link to your LinkedIn page again, the more views it gets the better the chance of someone liking it and be interested in meeting you for an interview.
