BCjobs Blog

Making time for networking — I had thought of calling this article, “Finding the Time for Networking” but the truth is that finding the time is not really the biggest hurdle. Instead, it’s making the time.

Standout job interviews can help you land jobs. But, if you want to stand out at job interviews, you need to make the right impression. Benjamin Franklin said it best: “It’s hard for an empty bag to stand upright.”

Are you prepared to answer the question “what do you do?” Do you have a 30-second elevator pitch prepared? Here’s what we find when doing our Positive Networking® workshops: people work up a sweat when we ask them to answer this question!

Riffling through stacks of business cards to find the one you want is a time waster if ever there was one. Besides, Murphy’s Law dictates that the business card you want is always at the bottom of the last stack you look through. Here are four simple ideas that will change what you do with the business cards you receive.

Positive Networking is not all about you. It’s discovering what you can do for someone else. While there is a place for transactional networking, the majority of networking opportunities are not about closing a sale but opening a relationship.

Summer is a time to chill out and networking isn’t on most people’s radar. Dressing up, standing around in a windowless hotel meeting room, doing something that you already find kind of stressful—who wants to do that when you could be at beach or on a bike ride after work?

Networking successfully requires jobseekers to build positive energy into their networking efforts. This can be done with mirror neurons. To find a job, you need to get out there and network, but you may have noticed there’s a wall jobseekers often run right into.

The ability to do effective networking is an often overlooked leadership skill, but it’s one that will greatly assist you in getting the career you want. Ibarra and Hunter, authors of “How Leaders Create and Use Networks,” published in the January 2007 issue of The Harvard Business Review, stated that: “Networking is simultaneously one of the most self-evident and one of the most dreaded developmental challenges that aspiring leaders must address.”