Being Laid Off Part 2: Expand your Network
Marathons are great and, more than anything, show how much support and care people can give one another, expecting nothing in return. A few weeks ago, I ran the Detroit half and was cheered on by my biggest fan (my wife). But then, when I crossed the finish line, we ran to mile 19 to cheer our friend on for his full marathon. Pay-it-forward support is great on a marathon but also key for a job search.
Earlier this year, I did a two-part series on how to be laid off and how to get hired. It went through my personal strategy on how to find a new job, specifically when you don’t have one, although it works when quietly searching between meetings, too. I recommend looking at my blog for both ‘How to be laid off’ and ‘How to get hired’ for background, but in this new round of job hunting, I had one significant update:
Mutual Connections are gold mines.
The black hole that is the online application portal has not improved; ATS systems are as cold and obscure as always; AI can help tailor your resume to the system, but on the off chance that works, you then get your super weird ATS optimized resume to a person who sees how weird it is a goes to the next one. This means there are three ways to get a job right now:
Have the exact experience of the job you are applying to, so you naturally get through the ATS system and human check. This makes it very hard to progress in your career and only works for laterals, but it is an option in a pinch.
Know someone at the company. Preferably a recruiter or someone in management so they can do more than throw your resume into the smaller inbox that is blanket referrals.
Be reached out to by a recruiter to skip the whole process.
But what do you do when you like a job and none of those fit? Do you chance the resume bucket? You can, but how about Mutual Connections on LinkedIn instead? Only on a marathon course have I had my faith in humanity restored more than seeing people rally around the unemployed on LinkedIn. By reaching out to your connections with connections at companies, you can try to build a version of ‘know someone at the company.’ Trust me, if your connection has any real experience with that person you are trying to get a hold of, they will reach out for you, and it may just get you that referral.
So here is the process:
Click on the company page from the job posting you are on and open it in a new tab so you still have the job up.
Select ‘People’ and start scrolling. Anyone you know should show up first (and would have been mentioned on the job posting), but mutual connections will be scattered throughout the upper names. Look through so you can find either the person you know the best as a mutual connection or the person you have a mutual connection with who is closest to the job you are looking at.
Select the person, and under ‘Highlights,’ you will have the option to ask for an introduction. My preference at this point is to reach out to the mutual connection in the most direct method I have (text or email, ideally), but you can message them directly from this screen as well.
And that’s it. Your network is much larger than you think, just like in rock climbing; don’t do it alone.