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Saturday, May 16, 2009

Six steps far from your desired Job.-Personal Branding II

Six degrees of Separation- The art and the science in finding a job in this troubled market. Personal Branding-II

Imagine a kind of situation when you don’t have to apply for a job, but you’re landing up with all the good offers and employers are obliged if you join them. This is not the tale of Alice in Wonderland honey, this might be a possibility, because a person who’s highly visible by the head hunters in the Internet and networked with the right people at the right time might be needed at the right place, and you never know who might need you badly to join their company and might be pressing you hard to join them with a bigger and fatter pay checks with better benefits.

I always used to get amazed by a friend of mine who used to act as a scavenger. Hey, don’t get astonished by that term in the Internet world. How many of you generally go through those chain mails and forward to the people in your address book daily? Many of us, we forward to our friends and colleagues daily and then delete it without even seeing the matter well. Many like me delete it in the first shot to break the chain. We’re aware of some people in the net known as chain e-mail collectors known as scavengers and these mails are one of their weapons to collect the e-mail id’s of yours and mine. My friend collects those chain mails and makes database of e-mails for e-mail marketing once he does the right segmentation of those data. Right now we’re aware that, these e-mails are saleable and target marketing yields very good result inexpensive way. This is a part of Below the Line (BTL) activities while we talk about promotions.

Naturally the question comes now what, how and where this Six Degree of separation theory has got relevance with our topic of discussion. They say the world is small and round, Six degrees of Separation (also referred to as the "Human Web") refers to the idea that, if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is at most six steps away from any other person on this planet named Earth. It was popularized by a written by John Guare.

Several studies, such as Milgram's small world experiment, have been conducted to empirically measure this connectedness. While the exact number of links between people differs depending on the population measured and the types of links used, it is generally found to be relatively small. Hence, the phrase "six degrees of separation" is often used as a synonym for the idea of the "small world" phenomenon.

So, there's this job that you really want. But, to get it, you'd have to find a way to get yourself in a direct dialogue with the hiring manager—the one person who can decide that you are precisely the right person for the job.

Initially, though, the outlook is grim because you don't know anyone—either in IT or the cafeteria—who works there. But, in all likelihood, if you know someone to your target company, you're a lot closer to that job and know that hiring manager than you think. You might be just six degrees away from making contact, according to recent research. I know you would now ask me, am I kidding? At this moment most of the job sites are repeating their jobs, in different consulting companies name, hiring been frozen last seven to eight months back in most of companies. What’s the point in getting connected with the hiring managers now? Can they hire now? Because, I may be needing a job right now.

Well, they say that, even a farmer has to wait for the entire season to get his crop back home safely. Not in the western world, now even in India, jobs are happening and happening at a very slower pace at this gloomy period. This is the right time for marketing, as I told you in my last article about personal branding. This is all about Social Networking. This exercise is also a part of personal marketing strategies, once the personal brand is slowly established in the market. Imagine a situation if you start doing it now, your visibility would be higher when this market moves upwards.

The other way round, most of the recruiters now try to get people for their client’s requirements from the social networking sites e.g. LinkedIn, SiliconIndia, Facebook etc because these are having more selective and quality people, far better than the job sites. Many talented people who’re stable with their current employers are naturally out from the job market. So, their visibility is much lesser through the job sites. Now, suppose a person’s skills and acumen just exactly matched with the client’s requirements, who might be not looking for a change at this moment, who knows he might change his mind by seeing the offer of your client. In the recruitment Industry nowadays its more of head hunting than finding suitable people for the requirements. They know their target companies and its more of aggressive poaching than anything else. It’s a competitive and small world.

What this means for today's job hunters is that getting in touch with the right person may only be a matter of tapping the friendship and professional wells dug throughout their career years. Instead of just the regularly hyped advice to network with peers and friends, the focus needs to be much more direct. Here's the basic three-step approach:

  1. First, identify your dream job and two or three runners-up.
  2. Identify the job title and be specific. For example, "Senior Technology Manager for Internal System Networking at Company C".You might have to research the specific title given for certain tasks at your dream companies.
  3. Then start hitting your connections, both professional and personal, with all the specific information—from the company, location, title, and department, and ask them questions, such as:
  • "Do you know someone who works for a company that has an ongoing relationship with my target company?"
  • "Do you know anyone who used to work for my target company?"
  • "Do you know someone who works in the same general industry as my target company?"

Make it clear to all the contacts that you're trying to find out who hires senior technology managers at company C. If you can find the target person's name—the actual hiring manager—make sure you ask everyone if they can connect you to that hiring manager as well. If you can't find out the hiring manager's name, use some senior names at the company, such as the CEO or the CIO. Include your names in your request for insight from your peers and friends. Include every personal and professional tidbit you can scour in research—the hiring manager's alma mater, the CIO's hometown, the recruiter's personal interests etc. Nowadays to reduce the employee hiring costs, most of the companies are going for internal employee referrals schemes for any open position. The effort will be well worth it because sometimes it's just one piece of data that can open the door to an interview.

4 comments:

Kaushik Bhattacharya said...

Liked the Blog.
Very good..

Cheri Bock, CPC said...

Well written and accurate... I would certainly recommend this to my friends and collegues to read.

Thank, you
Cheri

Sourav Sam Bhattacharya said...

Everything is possible, the key is to solidify the value prop both parties are bringing to the table. Is the potential new hire someone who can bring rock solid value to the company, and likewise is the potential employer a company who knows to differentiate real-value from a glib toungue. Also, the value prop should be sustainable, not last a short time. Attitude is also a key parameter.

Regards,
sourav

Glenn Gutmacher said...

Thank you for your generosity in sharing this wealth of knowledge. You certainly have nailed the use of these new social networking tools and look forward to implementing
them in my job search as well as marketing efforts wherever
I end up working

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