The other morning, in an otherwise nondescript mid-fall grey-drizzle day, the plaintive sounds of Amazing Grace drifted out of the streetcar shelter as I waited for the 506. There were no parades on the horizon that day. The sweet sounds came from a working mother with a recorder (or was it a flute?), who, unlike the rest of us busily checking our emails, spent the seven-minute wait time practising for an upcoming concert. Like a lot of time-strapped mothers, it was hard for this commuter to find time for herself — by the time she had squeezed a few minutes out of the prior night it was 10 p.m. and playing an instrument would have woken her kids up. (I found all this out after remarking on her playing.)
Being on the introvert end of the scale I usually don’t go up to strangers (besides, I’m way too deep to talk about an upcoming storm or a change in temperature); but that morning, feeling moved by the song, I took the social risk of speaking to someone I didn’t know. It seemed like an apt start to my day as I was going to an open house (at the Yonge-Eglinton Toronto Employment & Social Services office), something which usually involves meeting and networking with new people (aka strangers).
The open house also gave me the chance to listen to someone in HR talk about job searching from an employer’s perspective. Fittingly, the HR person, Leena Naik, of RioCan Real Estate emphasized the importance of job seekers meeting and engaging with new people. At the very least, be able to talk to strangers about the weather or the commute, she advised. Unless you work on an assembly line, every job requires that you speak to other people, she pointed out.
The art of relating to others and making small talk is, of course, the backbone of networking, something that is lauded by recruiters and HR types (including Naik) as the best way to find a job. “The way you’ll often hear about something is through someone,” she said, adding that networking makes a job hunter stand out from the competition. By networking “you’re not one of a 1,000 applications that came in last week.” No stranger herself to this job search strategy, Naik spoke about her experiences finding work through networking. “I wanted to do it on my own” but it worked out for me when I followed advice and networked. “You really cannot network enough.”
Naik is a fan of information interviewing, something she sees as a good way to practise talking to strangers. (Remember: a “real” interview almost always involves talking to people that you don’t know.) Although she also thinks LinkedIN is a good networking tool, she notes that having 500 LinkedIn connections doesn’t mean much if you never meet people face-to-face.
Creating relationships quickly is “the foundation of your job search networking success,” according to small talk expert Katherine Moody, who notes that small talk gives you and the other person a chance to find something that you have in common and begins the process of building a relationship. Moody offers non-small talk experts some tips, such as make your first remarks neutral and non-threatening and say something relevant to the situation. This post from the Not so crazy Introvert blog also has some small talk strategies for introverts (whose problem is not that they are shy but that they do not know what to talk about,) such as keeping up-to-date by reading Google trends, picking up on clues from others that you can expand on, and using Facebook to find out what people post (if you know people who might be at the networking event).
Contributed by www.poss.ca
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