Networking Your Way to an Interview

We all had that friend in college who was fanatical about taking the best professors and the most notable classes, even if he had to wake up at 8:30 on a Friday. While the rest of us were shuffling our schedules to keep three-day weekends and one o’clock wake-ups, our overly ambitious friend was reading articles, researching classes, and talking to professors to gain entrance into their exclusive courses. In the working world, that’s called networking, and you can bet that anal amigo will have a much easier time getting a job than the rest of us. About.com and CollegeRecruiter.com estimate that up to 80% of job seekers get their gigs through some form of networking. It wasn’t good to be in the bottom 20% of your class at university, and it certainly isn’t good to be in it now when the competition is even more fierce. Networking is a nuanced art, and not knowing what to ask for and whom to ask will probably let you keep those coveted three day weekends and late wake-ups, but only because you’ll be unemployed. So let’s break down exactly how to sail this odd social sea.

Why Networking Works

The first key to networking is attitude. You have to avoid sycophantic sucking up or throwing on an I’m-more-qualified-than-I-actually-am-because-I-went-to-Oxford-and Harvard-and-therefore-know-everything affect. People naturally distrust ass-kissing and hate smugness. The key is to be candid about what you want to do and how much you appreciate outside guidance. Remember that people like to find any way they possibly can to feel good about themselves, and helping you get a job is a pretty painless way for someone to get their karma quotient without shelling out a few hard earned bucks to the local bum. Opening an honest dialogue with the people around you in positions of any kind of power whatsoever is the first step to building a network that will eventually lead to mentorship, advice, and (hopefully) a job with a corner office, a plush leather chair, and a closet full of mint condition Transformer action figures (okay, maybe that last one is just me).

Keep It in Family

The most obvious and occasionally most annoying of all the networking strategies is asking family for help. Nothing’s worse than having to “talk about the future” with your parents and their aged cohorts, but those very people whose car you took joyriding when you were fourteen are your first stop for finding a job. Remember, most of your family and their friends will have been working in their respective industries for about twenty to thirty years by the time you graduate from college, meaning that they likely know not only a ton of people in their own industry but many others in surrounding industries. They are also the people most eager to help, since they remember you as a cute little kid with a penchant for running through the house naked (and hopefully not as a disgruntled teenager with a penchant for grand theft auto—the crime, not the videogame).

On Campus Outlets

Everyone on campus is a potential networking aide. Frat buddies and A/V clowns all have parents and parents’ friends. Professors, particularly in business and international relations, will likely have great contacts in their respective fields. Spend that last semester talking it up with your favorite and most influential profs and the conversation may very well lead to a contact.

Alumni Networks

Graduating does not mean cutting the academic umbilical cord. In fact, you're going to want to keep that cord as alive for aslong as you can. Anyway, start with the university website, but if that doesn’t work, reach out to the career or alumni office. Find any alumni, no matter how recently they’ve graduated, who works in your future field, shoot them an email detailing who you are and what you are looking to do, and request an informational interview. You can also work backwards with this, searching company websites for fellow grads and contacting them that way. If the number of forty-year olds who still don their college sweatshirts and get aneurysms during the Final Four are any indication, people are very connected to their alma mater and are often more than happy to give job advice in exchange for a little nostalgic reliving of on-campus exploits. Finally, don't rule out the influence of people one to three years out of college, as they are often used to vet resumes from their alma mater.

Social Networks

As good as Facebook and Friendster were for sharing funny pictures of yourself pole-dancing in a tutu, they are just as helpful now in terms of finding a job (p.s. please see our strategy guide Cleaning Up Your Online Profile for ways to avoid sabotaging yourself after college). Most of these sites list current employers in a person’s profile (if he or she chooses to provide it), so don’t hesitate to search for the company and see who turns up in your network. Someone may just be unwittingly linked to you or a friend. And if you haven’t yet done so, you should probably join a career-networking site like LinkedIn or the humorously named Doostang, which don't involve hilarious pictures but are specifically geared to career networking.