News

Secret of success: effective networking

Amid the gloom of persistently high unemployment, some
Silicon Valley workers are finding jobs.

By Margaret Steen
Mercury News

Their success didn’t come from sending out thousands of
résumés or spending hours online each day looking for job
postings. The key, according to the newly employed
workers, is making personal connections.

Their stories offer hope for the 76,900 job hunters in Santa
Clara County who haven’t been as lucky. Successful job
seekers have found work in a variety of industries, from
hotels to high tech.

“Most of the people who seem to be getting work right now are the people doing the networking,” said Henry Newton, an
employment program representative with the Employment Development Department in Campbell.

Companies are overwhelmed by applicants for open positions. “If someone in that organization says, `I used to work with this
person,’ ” Newton said, “they’ve got the job.”

A recent survey by outplacement firm DBM found that 63 percent of job seekers in the United States found employment through
professional networking.

Job seekers are looking for leads at meetings of professional organizations, at support groups for the unemployed, and even while
riding the train or at the hair stylist.

“What we’ve seen is a proliferation of various types of networking circles, groups and connections in the past year,” said Patti
Wilson, principal and founder of The Career Co.

Sometimes job hunters’ conversations with friends, former co-workers and even strangers can lead them directly to a job
interview. Other workers have found jobs by replying to an ad and using their connections to prepare for the interview.

• Khawer Salahuddin found out about a job at Regalcom.com in Fremont from someone he met at a wedding. He went to work for
the company in May and is director of operations and business development.

• After 12 years of running a graphics services business with her husband, Denise Commandeur of Saratoga decided this summer
to look for a corporate job. A friend told her that she was about to leave her position as a budget coordinator with a local high-tech
company to go back to school.

“When my friend resigned, she turned my résumé in with her resignation,” Commandeur said. After five interviews, Commandeur
got the job.

• Two weeks after losing his job in the construction industry, Oscar Carrasco of Milpitas found his hotel maintenance job after
talking to an EDD counselor with whom he plays racquetball. The counselor told him about CalJOBS, the state-sponsored online job
site, where he found the hotel job listing. He brought his résumé to the company in person and was hired.

• After contacting 125 companies during an eight-month job search, Dennis Andrie of Castro Valley got a job lead from a recruiter
whom he had known for more than two years. He had nurtured the relationship with this recruiter by sending him periodic updates
about his career and occasionally passing on names of possible candidates. Andrie was hired in June as channel sales manager
with a local professional services firm.

Not everyone finds their job through personal contacts. Matthew Stringer of Mountain View will soon start a job with a scientific
staffing company that he spotted online. But he says the contacts he made during his job search, including through the ProMatch job
seekers’ program, taught him about the market and helped him keep his energy up.

Connie Archea of San Mateo was hired last month as a medical research coordinator at a local university after she simply sent in
her résumé. But she said the network she had built up by attending PenNet, a job seekers’ group on the Peninsula, during her
nine-month job search provided important support.

“I had people to talk over salary negotiations with, or possible questions they might ask,” Archea said.

Despite these testimonials, networking is no guarantee of a job. It isn’t always easy, either. To some people, talking to total
strangers about their job hunt seems scary and even wrong.

“It’s considered bad form to toot your own horn,” said Mimi Bross, a career counselor in private practice in Saratoga.

Even normally outgoing people may find ongoing unemployment depressing and isolating.

“When you’re unemployed you feel like a loser sometimes,” said one local executive assistant, who asked that her name not be
used. “You see everybody going to work, feeling important, driving their shiny cars.”

Another problem is that unemployed people tend to meet a lot of other unemployed people, who may have some job leads but aren’t
always the best sources of information about what’s going on inside companies.

“If you go to any kind of event that has any kind of networking possibility, it’s hard to filter out the networkers from the people who
really have jobs,” said Jon Rodriguez of East Palo Alto, who has been looking for a marketing job since November.

Rodriguez and many others like him keep networking, though, hoping it will lead to employment.

“People get jobs through people, whether it’s formal or informal,” Bross said.

Contact Margaret Steen at [email protected] or (408) 278-3499.

http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/3654501.htm

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