Networking

FREE “How To” Guide to Networking

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Did you know 61% to 85% of people land jobs through networking? No?! Get started on your network now. Here’s a free guide to help you courtesy of me, yours truly, and the writers of Career Hub. Enjoy!

Download Your Free Guide to Networking

guide to networking The “Insider’s Guide to Networking” is Career Hub’s fourth eBook and you can download it for free without spending a penny, signing away your first-born child or even giving them an email address!

To download a copy, CLICK HERE.

The experts give their very best advice on the subject of networking – topics include advice on networking for introverts, what NOT to do when networking, and how the Internet is revolutionizing networking.

Get your copy here and check out other eBooks while you’re there. In these books, our experts (yep, I’m one of them) offer advice on job search, resume writing, and interviewing.

Please feel free to share this eBook with others or send your friends here for their own copy.

Networking 101: Starting Conversations

Wendy Terwelp 1 Comment

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years trying to get people interested in you.” — Dale Carnegie Great advice Carnegie – and a great start for networking. One of the best ways to begin a conversation – and become interested in others – is by asking open-ended questions. 

What’s an open-ended question? One that cannot be answered by either “yes,” “no” or another one-word response.  Question: “Is this your first time at this event?” Answer: “Yes.” Gee how exciting. Makes you really warm up to that person, eh? 

Instead, how about asking, “So, what brought you to this meeting?” or “What interested you most about this speaker?” Now that can start a conversation. 

Sizzling Summer Job Search Tips

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Sizzling Summer Job Search Tips Here are some terrific tips to jump start your job search in the summer months – courtesy of my pal Kim Issacs of Monster.com and PowerResume.com:

Are you taking a break from the job search and surrendering to the lazy days of summer? The conventional wisdom is that almost everyone is in vacation mode from Memorial Day through Labor Day. Consequently, many postpone job searching until September.

Is this a mistake? Could you be missing opportunities if you take the summer off? We asked the career experts to find out.

Summer Job Searching — Worthwhile or Waste of Time?

“I often hear job seekers say that they want to take the summer off,” says Wendy Terwelp, career coach and president of Mequon, Wisconsin-based career management firm Opportunity Knocks. Terwelp says that by the time the summer ends, job seekers who took the summer off will be competing against even more job seekers who have followed the same strategy.

Read on!

The Fourth – a great time to network

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Tomorrow is the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and a great time for networking. Throughout the U.S. are cookouts, parties, barbeques, festivals, and other social gatherings making it a terrific time to build and maintain your network. In our teleclass Rebuilding Your Network 5 Minutes a Day, one of the tips was to incorporate your networking into things you’re already doing… if you’re already attending a fun social gathering, make networking a part of it.

A quick tip for networking tomorrow: Listen. That means really listen to your guests for opportunities, problems, or situations during a conversation listen to how you could help them. It could be a nice opportunity for you or someone who is in your network already to help one of your guests. One of my clients, an electrical engineer, was visiting a friend during a holiday. My client’s friend was just hired at a software company and invited my client for a tour. Next thing my client knew, he met the owners happened to be walking around during the tour and my client landed an interview. The interview was much more relaxing rather than a standard grilling because the interviewers had more time to spend with my client because of the standard holiday shut down. It was a more casual and pleasant interview, rather than a standard grilling. This person was more introverted and had been thinking about passing on the party but went and now he’s hired at a new wonderful job.

Something to think about when networking to your next big gig. Enjoy!

Network like a girl – it’s a good thing

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Check out this cool survey by ExecuNet:

Do you network like a girl? If so, you have the advantage. In our gender analysis of data from our 15th annual Executive Job Market Intelligence Report, women assessed their networks more positively than their male counterparts, giving themselves much higher “excellent” ratings.

Source: ExecuNet, 2007

Dave Opton, CEO and founder of ExecuNet, offered a couple of non-scientific reasons for the divide. “Two-thirds more women than men said they worked on building their professional networking relationships ‘very often;’ and self-assessment is subjective and without universal measurement.”

Despite their super networking skills, women are still less visible in the corporate executive suite than are men, and a 2004 study in the American Journal of Business outlined some of the influential factors.

“Female executives do not achieve top ranked executive positions at the same frequency as do male executives. However, top female executives are significantly younger, and have fewer years of service with the company and in their job positions, than their male counterparts. This may be indicative of the movement to encourage and support women to achieve higher corporate positions, but it could also provide a reasonable explanation for the observed compensation gender gap,” write Joanne Healy Burress and Linda J. Zucca in the report.

ExecuNet’s proprietary research produced encouraging news: while the title and compensation gap exists, the differential was roughly just $20,000, and both genders expected about the same increase in wages from 2006 to 2007 — 7 percent.

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Now all we need is more cash, right girls?