I got an email from the director of Career Directors, Laura DeCarlo, sharing a post to Scott’s Hello My Name Is blog post titled If You Seriously Can’t Execute (At Least) One of Your Ideas After Reading This Blog Post, Then I Am Just Going to Snap. It’s a great post… I see this stuff all the time – people have great ideas but they never get to the point where they actually implement them. Read Scott’s post to see what might be holding you back on moving forward (whether in a job search, on a business idea, or whatever).
His first point is really, really interesting, and it is a great followup to yesterday’s post about JUST GETTING STARTED. Scott says, in his first point, that you don’t get started (on your idea) because “You’re too busy networking.”
What do you think? Do you think that network is getting in the way of your job search?
But wait, you say…. we’re supposed to network! Everyone says that’s how you find a job – you network! How can networking get in the way of your job search?
A few weeks ago I was talking to an unemployed executive who made an interesting observation: most of the networkers he saw had no purpose and seemed to just be hanging out.
Hanging out IS NOT networking!
If you don’t know why you are going to a networking meeting, don’t know what to do when you get there, or don’t know how to follow up, but you spend a lot of time “networking,” then you need some help. Here are three books that helped me:
- Keith Ferrazzi’s Never Eat Alone.
- Thom Singer’s Some Assembly Required.
- Sandy Jones-Kaminski’s I’m at a Networking Event – Now What???
Don’t spend time “hanging out,” that is not one of the prescribed job search tactics!
