Networking is Key to Job-hunting If you want to be prosperous for a year, grow grain. If you want to be prosperous for ten years, grow trees. If you want to be prosperous for a lifetime, grow people. --CHINESE PROVERB.
Networking is about growing and cultivating people…..relationships, friendships, synergies, and trusts. Like IQ and EQ, high Networking Quotient (NQ) is a pre-requisite to personal and professional success.
Dr. Stephen Covey says in his epoch making book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that highly effective and successful people are neither dependent nor independent, in fact, they’re interdependent people. They derive strength from others and give strength to others. Successful people are like colonies, they interact with each other, help each other, support each other, integrate with each other, coordinate with each other, synergize with each other for the ultimate and collective good of the entire community. They survive on their mutual strengths; they thrive on their collective resources.
Someone has rightly said that T.E.A.M stands for Together Everyone Achieves Miracles. Networking is a very powerful tool for success in general and business in particular. Do you know a referral generates 80% more results than a cold call and 70% of all jobs are found through networking? And this percentage becomes even more than 90% for senior jobs. The jobs that you see advertised in papers are just a tip of the iceberg. They’re not more than 5% of the total job market.
Job campaigns often stall because job-hunters leave their personal networks too quickly to go off into the world of "strangers." Strangers will seldom be as responsive to you as people whom you’ve met before even briefly. Surprisingly, your attendance at a trade show can qualify you as a “friend” in someone’s eye. Make sure you get your job-hunt strongly established with personal friends and business acquaintances before you spend a lot of time answering ads or cold calling. Cold calling isn't very appealing—that’s why they call it cold calling! When you need someone’s help for job referral, cold calling will not work. Warm Calling will help you get your objectives.
Let me clarify at this stage that networking isn’t about extracting benefits from people. Networking is about saying “please let me know if I can do anything for you”. Networking is asking people the question “what do you need that I can help you with?” It’s about “going an extra mile”. It’s about ‘giving and sharing”. The basic philosophy of networking is “Living is Giving”. Unconditional giving is a fundamental law of life.
“Enter thou among My people; Enter thou My Garden”. AL-QURAN
Unconditional giving is a habit of nature. It’s like sowing a seed that has the potential to germinate and sprout into a blossoming tree. It’s a law of nature that what goes around comes around. Life has a boomerang effect. When you throw the boomerang, it comes back. It doesn’t return directly, but in its own roundabout way, it does return to its place of origin. The same thing is true of networking. If you take the initiative to give, to participate, and to contribute, benefits will come back to you in some way, although they’d not necessarily come back immediately from the same person. In fact, sometimes they’ll come back from totally unexpected places.
In my next articles, I will be sharing practical tools and strategies as to how a job-seeker can network with those who matter. (Ashraf Chaudhry can be reached at ashraf@ashrafchaudhry.com)
