Relationships mostly beat Skills!
Don't focus only on skills, relationship takes you to next level.
This topic came to my mind when taking a course on Udemy focused on entrepreneurship where I learned how networking can be more useful than your skills. This made me realize that I could actually blend a nice article by sharing my approach to network with people with what Chris Haroun shared in his course.
Networking is always important than skills just like a sales pitch is more important thana product. I have seen so many people where their networking skills have helped them get a job despite having no expertise at all but a passion and eagerness to succeed.
LinkedIn is a great tool and one of the easiest to find people. The approach to get a job that you are dreaming of is quite simple. Let’s break into three steps;
Find the person
Finding the relevant person who is important, it could be someone from your school/city/country, or may be having shared interests, you might need advanced search from the LinkedIn Premium (utilize the one more trial). It is good to have a person within your specific field like software engineer or like a talent recruiter otherwise the chances are slim.
Reaching Out
Second is to ask them! A message to the person. A simple and brief message is enough to start with. Don’t over complicate by writing a lengthy message or irrelevantcontent, stick to the main point. If you are using LinkedIn Premium then thereis a feature you might have seen, known as the InMail, that could help, howeverI am not a fan of it as most of InMails come from recruiters and are ignored inthe inbox. So, I always stick to the normal message which have so far worked fine.
Meeting up
Meeting with someone helps a lot but to have a cup of coffee with someone could be difficult, if you are successful in getting a useful reply then the second message could be used for meeting up. The only way it could work if you reach out to someone who lives/works close by, for that you would definitely have to use the advance search feature to get people from a specific area.
The more you network and make good relationships the easiest would be for you to get a new job in the future.
The companies also work in a similar fashion when it comes to hiring. All companiesurge their employees to refer top talent from their network, because it becomesan easy recruiting process, instead of going through so many candidates youjust get what you want easily and quickly. On the other hand, employees also dotheir best as they earn a bonus for referral. That’s the sweet spot, if you havea good relationship with someone then most likely they are going to pull youinto their company, they earn, you get a job, and finally working with someoneyou already know is always fun.
Asan example, if you are looking for a job in Google, then applying directly andgetting a call is very tough, so the approach is to network with the rightpeople by using above approach.
To land a job, there are more great strategies on how to use LinkedIn, read here.
If interested in the course check out here.