Needle, Meet Haystack

After years of being online and chatting, from ICQ and AIM to Facebook Chat and Skype, I’ve found that there is one thing that terrifies people more than anything else:

“Hi.”

Because of the relative anonymity passed through the typed word (or perhaps in spite of it), chatters seem to fall into one of two groups: those who instigate the conversation most of the time, and those who rarely (if ever) instigate a conversation.  These groups are active and reactive communicators, respectively.

These two groups fall into an 80-20 distribution; 80% of chats are instigated by the 20% of  chatters who are active communicators.  It’s not often that a person will switch sides; active communicators will receive messages but will still send them out, while reactive communicators will at most send a few messages out if doing so grants them some utility.  But these messaging traits also are strong indicators of how someone will do in the job search and their career.

Active communicators are used to instigating conversations, following up, and developing relationships.  As a side effect of instigating conversations, they usually are the ones who steer discussions and develop stronger communication skills.

Reactive communicators, meanwhile, are too passive in sending messages out to others.  By waiting for messages to come in, they develop a complacency and unjustified expectation that any communication they do send out will be rewarded with a response.

But the transition, if one makes the conscious decision to make it, is easy.  A reactive communicator need only start sending messages to others a bit more frequently and start more conversations.  Unsure who to talk to?  How about the active communicators who send you messages?

Developing active communication techniques will make you more efficient when communicating with others, and more effective on the job search.  So what are you waiting for?  All it takes is a “Hi.”

PREFACE: I think I read about this somewhere, but I can’t remember where.  If you have any idea of the source, go ahead and mention it in the comments.

If you take as minute to think about all of the different people you know, you might notice some trends in how well you know them, and what you know about them.  You;ll find that they fall into many different categories, but you can break down the categories thusly:

• Level 1: Small talk and basic stuff.  Usually reserved for new friends and acquaintances.
• Level 2: Generic likes and dislikes.  For people you’ve known a few weeks or months.
• Level 3: Beliefs.  More serious talk, for closer friends.
• Level 4: Motivations.  Deep, “this is what I’m really all about” stuff shared among your inner circle.

There are fewer and fewer people as you go up in levels, as people usually move up through a combination of time and shared experiences.  But finding a way to accelerate movement up the levels can benefit you when meeting new people and in new environments (like during an interview, starting a new job, and so on).  By accelerating the development of your interpersonal relationships, you will have a wider array of people you can talk to, work with, learn from, and trust.  I’m not advocating getting everyone to level 4 as quickly as possible; this is more about moving someone from level 1 to level 2.

The simplest way to accelerate both the amount of time and number of shared experiences that you have with someone is to create opportunities for both to happen sooner.

Our sense of time is relative; things can slow to a crawl during boredom or speed up when we’re feeling energetic.  But things also seem to progress at a greater length when we go different places.  Think back to the last time you had a very busy day.  Chances are, you were running around town, taking care of a lot of errands at a lot of different places.  And when we change locations, our minds interpret a greater amount of time as having passed.  Similarly, changing locations with others makes the amount of time you’ve spent together appear to be longer.

Another way to deepen relationships is to create opportunities for shared experiences.  It doesn’t need to be a complex gesture – it can be something as simple as working together on a project.  Shared experiences create a stronger bond between two people, so the more of them you can accrue with another person, the closer you will become.

Try developing your interpersonal relationships by moving a few people up a level or two – you’ll be amazed at the changes in your social networks and the opportunities that you will be presented with.

If you’ve ever used a social networking website, you have probably come across two related phenomena: the friend suggestion and the collection.

The friend suggestion, otherwise known as the “people you may know” page, often holds people who fit into one of several categories:

• People you know but don’t want to know online
• People you’ve heard of or might be vaguely acquainted with
• People you don’t know but somehow 50% of your friends do
• People who you don’t know at all
• People you don’t know but want to stalk over the Internet

So who should you add?

How about all of them!

It’s a good idea to send out the request with a message saying how you know them, or barring that, who you know them through.  By reaching out and developing your network outside of the usual people, you might find others who can help you with everything from finding a job to joining new activity groups.  And you’ll be making new friends.

If you’re a bit nervous about the whole experience, just use the three-second rule.

The collection is a unique phenomenon that traces back to users’ early experiences with Pogs, trading cards and Pokemon.  It’s the adding of others just for the sake of having a large number of friends and then never talking to them.  And don’t lie and say you’re not guilty of this – everyone’s done it.  In fact, if you follow through with the friend suggestion, you might wind up with a collection.

So how do you deal with a collection?  You turn it back into a list of contacts!  As an experiment earlier this week, I messaged 50 people who had become part of my “collection” on a social networking site, and I heard back from 46 of them.  That means that 92% of the time, I was able to re-initiate contact successfully.  Instead of staring at a screen of names and pictures of people I used to know, I now look at a screen full of social contacts.

Not sure who to get back in touch with or how to do it?  Use the three-second rule!

The point of a social network is to network socially, and if you don’t take advantage of the contacts you could or already have, you might be missing out on some great opportunities – and great people.

If you’re not aware, I recently joined the Brazen Careerist network, where you can connect with other professionals, read some truly excellent articles from a bunch of awesome blogs, and get your professional self another good link on your Google search results.  I highly recommend this site as a social networking and information supplement to go along with your LinkedIn profile and readings of this blog.

And the site is this week’s link because it’s awesome and offers some great advice to job-seekers, job-havers, and anyone else along that sort of spectrum.  It has nothing to do with a couple of the posts here being featured posts.  Although that doesn’t hurt.

Brazen Careerist

Being unaccustomed to receiving much response from anyone about this blog, besides my mom saying “you’re doing great, honey” (thanks, Mom), I was a bit surprised that I had a post featured on Brazen Careerist that garnered some responses.  And there were responses, including a well-written featured post later in the week.

In the time-honored tradition of interweb debates and such, I’ll deal briefly with why I did not mention, as was suggested, “talking to actual live human beings, some of whom you may already know” before we move on to the actual title topic of this post.

I didn’t say anything about networking because it seemed a bit off-topic.  Wait, WHAT?!

Well, look at it this way: it’s about 11 AM and you’re cruising over to indeed.com to see who’s posted a position for an architect.  All of a sudden, your cat knocks over a poorly-placed can of soda onto the keyboard, and you’re without your main job-getting device.  What are the things that you can do that will serve the same function as what you were doing on your computer?

If you’ve followed my advice before (or read through the archives), you’d notice that I’ve already said you should use your whole freakin’ personal network to help you get a job.  I’ve also advocated getting in on job nepotism and offered you body language tips you can use while meeting people, so it’s not like I haven’t mentioned this sort of thing before.

I digress – on to the networking stuff!

Networking is a very well-researched subject, and there have been hundreds of millions of pages on how to do it best.  But you do know what networking really is, right?  It’s the grown-up term for meeting people!  And playground rules still apply.

Remember when you were in grade school, and you would make a new friend just because you both were wearing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirts?  Or how your entire class would be invited to everyone’s birthday parties?*  What happened?

As we got older, we got pickier about our friends, and birthday party attendance and invitation quantities dropped (not to mention that the presents suck more, in a ratio reminiscent of the supply/demand curve).  What did we forget that came so naturally to us as children?  What anxieties set in that make social interaction, from asking someone out on a date to making new friends, seem like an uphill battle?

Well, I couldn’t honestly tell you why.  But here are the only things you really need to know about how to network successfully:

If you can, use social proof. In the show, How I Met Your Mother, two of the male characters pick up women by asking if she has met the other guy.  For example:

BARNEY: Have you met Ted?

TED: Hi, I’m Ted.

WOMAN: Hi, Ted.

Sure, it’s a bit corny, but it underlines the concept of social proof.  If other people see that others are okay with you, vouch for you, or seem interested in you, then they will be more comfortable with you than if you walked up to them randomly.  Think about how many people are your friends because you met through a friend in common.  That’s social proof in action right there.

Find common ground. At an advertising mixer?  Well, then you probably can talk about advertising.  At a birthday party?  You can talk about how you know the birthday boy/girl (a sort of solo social proof method).  New to the office?  Talk to new co-workers about their early experiences.  As long as you can relate on some level, you’ll connect.

Ignore preconceptions. There was a kid in your grade school class who ate paste.  Maybe it was you.  But either way, that kid still had at least a few friends.  Imagine trying to be friends with an adult who eats paste.  See the problem?

There is no reason to ignore or dismiss someone because of some unique/different quality that they have.  Sure, we preach it, but we don’t often do it.  Think about Stephen Hawking – if you didn’t know he was Stephen Hawking, would you attempt to socialize with him?  Put aside whatever first impressions you have of people and just get to know them.  You might be surprised.

Professionalism is overrated. Unless you’re dining with royalty or snooty people, you don’t have to act overly straight-laced and proper.  I’m not advocating stripping down to your underoos, drinking to excess and cursing up a storm, but rather that you don’t need to have a stick up your butt while networking.

Most people are nervous about meeting new people.  If you’re relaxed, friendly and HUMAN, you will get along just fine.  Have you ever made any real friends or connections by being so prim and proper that it would make Miss Manners want to vomit?  I didn’t think so.

Don’t be afraid to be utilitarian. One of my best friends in college became my friend because he had a car and would drive me places to get things.  The rest came later.  One of my oldest friends and I started hanging out because I had a Sega Genesis.  The friendship then evolved.  Notice a pattern?

We use people all the time.  Be it for favors, money, advice or just about anything else.  So why not for a job?  As long as you can offer a convincing reason why they should (show them the benefit!), they will.  We’re all self-interested, so use that to help develop contacts at places where you want to work, in industries you want to know more about, and so on.

So that’s really about it.  If you aren’t quite sure if you get what you’re supposed to do during networking, here’s all you need to know: Be nice, be honest, and make friends.

So why didn’t I mention networking?  Because it’s something you already know how to do.  You learned it in kindergarten.

* This example does not apply to the home-schooled.  Sorry!

Something that has been discussed on occasion between myself and some friends is the introduction of the unemployed.  If you’re meeting someone new, do you tell them you don’t have a job?  Do you lie and use your last job title?  Do you quickly change the subject?

Well, I tell friggin’ everybody.  Every chance I get (as long as I don’t seem desperate or weird).

I don’t make it a point, but if it comes up in conversation, I will tell the person that I am looking for work, my field of expertise, and a little about some of the other stuff I’ve done.  I tell family, friends, acquaintances, and when you get right down to it, that’s part of the reason I started this blog.  And even if the people you tell can’t help you find a job, sometimes you can make good connections.

I told my cousin I was looking for work.  She told a friend, who passed it along to her brother, who happens to be a highly sought-after professional career adviser.  As a result, I got a resume consultation and advice that a lot of people might pay for for free, thanks to my telling one person.

Discussing your job situation isn’t something to be ashamed of.  It’s a way to help you network and maybe gain an advantage.  Or an interview.

…was the name of an article I once wrote. I hate to say this, but there’s no single method that anyone can give you to ensure career success. That is, unless you are a lucky victim of forced organizational nepotism. But we’ll get to you lucky jerks in a minute.

Here’s some myths that you should know are MYTHS because they’re not true:

- The best candidate gets the job. Are you kidding me? Your qualifications in previous internships, your old job, your education, and the seminars and books and blogs and all that crud doesn’t mean much if you don’t impress your potential employer. People like people who are like themselves. Hate golf but hear that your potential future boss loves it? Get on that effing green.

- You’ll get the right job if you hold out. Really? So if I wait around like the weird girl in the corner on prom night, the varsity quarterback will know to come over and sweep me off my feet? Why would he do that when he’s dancing with the cheerleading squad’s captain or chief or grand poobah (or whatever they’re called)? I would rather go the teen movie route and get glammed up and grab him myself. And I didn’t mean to emasculate myself there, but such is the way of the extended metaphor.

- You have to know someone working at the company to really have a shot working there. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve had jobs before where I didn’t know anyone working there before I met them during interviews or on the first day. It’s not all about contacts, though they do help.

Anyway, you can get attention by sticking out and doing something different. Show off your competitive advantage (we’ll talk about that in another post) and convince the people you’re applying with that you’re worth their time, and you can usually get at least a few toes in the door.

Waiting around, as we’ve discussed before, is about as useful as a single-use toilet. Sure, it might make you feel relaxed and good once, but after that, you find yourself sitting around in shit and have no one to blame but yourself. Yeah, I came up with that one too.

Finally, the contacts thing (nepotism people, this is where you come in): it doesn’t matter if you know an employee at the firm, especially one in your age group. They can’t do much to help you, and don’t want to be the person who wasted the managers’ time with someone who doesn’t get hired in the end (especially before another round of layoffs is coming). But if you know managers or upper-strata employees, then you have a shot. Make these contacts and use them like you’ll win something if you do (the prize is a career). Yes, I am actually telling you to make friends with old people. It’s okay, really!

I can’t promise you’ll get the job you want and grow rich, but at least you’ll be less likely to be stuck reading a bunch of articles about getting work that use horrible metaphors.