It’s not who you know… but who knows YOU that really counts in the job search. The more people know about you, the greater your exposure to potential career opportunities.
To frame it another way… it’s No who is in your personal core network-Who is they know. THOSE are the people you want to meet and the connections you want to cultivate.
You should realize that not everyone you come across as a result of your ‘People Search’ will be equally ‘connected’ to others, nor will they be as valuable to you in your People Search. Some people, for different reasons, are not deeply connected to social networks, while others are. You will have to connect with the latter.
You want to look for those who are more connected, as they are more likely to have a larger group of contacts on social media. This can help you expand and widen your personal social network online, and therefore increase your exposure to new career opportunities.
So, set up a mini-file of each of these people in your core network who know you well, including their company names and any other information you discover might be useful in the future.
Identify and add value to new influencers
Now, take your list of personal contacts, friends or family and visit LinkedIn. One at a time, look up their name, and if you find it, take note of how many other connections they have.
Then, assuming you have permission to see your friends’ connections, click and do the same. Note that on LinkedIn, you can choose to allow anyone to see all of your contacts, or you can restrict that view.
If you can see the people connecting with your friends’ contact, you’ll also be able to see detailed information about them, including their employer. If the company they work for is of interest to you, add it to your list of potential employers.
You can further expand your social network by doing the same as above and following the contacts of your contacts to his contacts. Now you are coming to a third degree of separation! You are looking for people who have a good number of connections. As a general rule of thumb, you want to find people on LinkedIn with at least 50 or more connections.
That’s an indication, though not an absolute guarantee, that they’re more attentive to social media. That may mean they understand the concept of networking and are likely to be active users of networks to some degree. Therefore, and can potentially be of more help.
Although not a given, these more connected people are also more likely than others to belong to other social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook, and other applications. This becomes important because they have a lot more potential connections to you and are more connected to what’s going on in your world in terms of jobs and opportunities.
Beyond LinkedIn
As you go through this process of identifying potential influencers on LinkedIn, you can take a step or two further.
The most active people on the network may have profiles on other social networks, and this can be an additional source of new contacts for you. There is definitely overlap. Each social network has different types of people that it attracts as a result of the type of interests that its members have.
As an example, you’ll probably find some of your family and friends contacts on one social networking site, others on two sites, and other friends on one or two of these sites, or perhaps on completely different sites.
Using this approach to collect, identify, and expand your social network of contacts in this way can keep you so busy that you may not consider using other resources.
However, if you want to do an even more thorough job, particularly finding other contacts who work at the specific companies you’re targeting, then lead generation tools can really help.
Online Lead Generation Tools
Lead generation tools/resources are best known to those of us in sales, marketing, or business development roles, as opposed to the rest of the public.
Since your livelihood depends on your ability to find the right people in your target accounts, being more effective in doing so will improve your chances of reaching a suitable decision-maker and getting a good lead in the form of a job or referral.
The Internet has fueled the growth of these tools, leveling the playing field for all who are willing to put in the effort. Like anything online, there are other sources that we haven’t discovered or used yet. But these tools can go a long way in finding potential new contacts, influencers, and even hiring authorities to add to your growing personal social network.
Two of these tools are Jigsaw and NetProspex.
Unlike general purpose LinkedIn, there is a small cost to access the older databases: $25/month at last look. But you can sign up for a month, do your research on any number of companies, and then end your subscription. You can always come back later in three months if you need this service again.
The beauty of these tools is their simplicity. For example, if you want to find out if there is a VP of Sales at Company X, just type in the company name and title and see what comes up.
The results can be one or several individuals or none at all. And they may or may not be who you are looking for. This works like a Google search, only with much higher precision.
You can also expand your search to all possible hiring “Managers” by typing in that term. You can find human resource managers, personnel managers, or sales managers. It’s a broader group, but you can discover related hiring authorities or influencers in other parts of the company by doing that type of search.
Lead generation tools are fluid
These three resources are very fluid and changeable. As with LinkedIn and other social networks, new members join every day.
Jigsaw and NetProspex contacts are “user generated”. This means that people using these lead-finding tools can add, change, and update information, including adding new contacts they have, and changing their status, titles, phone, and email contact information as they find it. As a result, the information you can find here changes and grows all the time. You may not find a contact you need today, but next week or month, there may be five you’ll find there.
Being user generated, not all information is up to date. Just like you, people leave companies, change jobs, or get promotions.
So yes, even though you ‘pay’ for each name you download (Jigsaw charges $1 per name) and get access to their contact information (phone number and email address), the information you seek doesn’t always turn out.
Please note that contact information may not always be accurate. The phone number can be the main number of the company. The email address may no longer work or be valid. The contact may have left the company entirely. But in those cases where you get a ‘failure’, just update the Jigsaw database and you’ll get a credit. Simple enough.
When you’re starting from scratch with few or no contacts at a company, having the ability to find people at your target companies who could be helpful in your search is huge. That’s the value of lead generation tools like Jigsaw and NetProspex.
Puzzle vs. netprospex
Jigsaw has been around longer while NetProspex is more of a newcomer but growing fast. One of the best things about NetProspex is that your data is kept up to date. Their focus is to do as much work as possible to verify the accuracy of the contacts in your database. They also focus on not having any leads older than two years.
Unlike Jigsaw, where you’ll find contacts that were created and entered by someone anywhere from today to several years ago, NetProspex contacts are more current. Therefore, this site may be a more accurate source of contact information for potential customers. However, it’s a newer site, so they don’t have the several million contacts you can access in Jigsaw’s database. However, NetProspex will catch up.
Remember that like any database, the information is never 100% identical. Sure, there will be overlap. A greater overlap of current information is a good thing. And finding new people in one database who weren’t in another is even better.
Other research tools
The goal is to find some good resources that can help you start building your personal social network.
There are plenty of other places to look, too. Some of these other resources include the obvious, like search engines.
Corporate websites, press releases, news archives
Don’t rule out visiting corporate websites. See if they have a “Press Releases-News Archives” section. This can be a useful source of information for mining and can reveal influential people or people in decision-making roles, simply because those are the types of people that are often quoted in articles/press releases.
It takes time to read or scan these kinds of things, but again, this is part of your research. There is no easy way to avoid the investigation. Once you’ve experimented with it a bit, you’ll come to appreciate its value.
trade publications
Each industry or market has one or sometimes several key trade publications/magazines. If you’re in the industry, you can often get what’s called a “controlled circulation” subscription for free. Just fill out the ‘bingo card’ and mail it in or fill it out online.
Better yet, check with your local major public library or university and see which ones they can subscribe to. They are often just the “main” in the larger markets, but you never know. And it doesn’t cost you a dime. Ask for the business librarian if they have one, as they will be more in tune with that aspect of their periodicals… which is what these periodicals are called.
In addition to being a solid source of information on a specific market, many times these periodicals have a ‘People in the News’ section on recent promotions and job changes. Look there and read these articles as a potential source to find potential influencers and hiring authorities to add to your personal social network.
And with many publications now putting their content online, do some research to see which ones can offer you free online access.
