So why did I spend $35 to attend? I had a mission. I was there to network. I was there to find people in the crowd that might help me in my job search.  I stood there with a hopeful and open expression on my face and a ready smile, balancing in my hand a rubbery bagel and coffee that was too hot at first then became too cold to drink.

While looking for a place to ditch my cold cup of coffee, I had an overpowering urge to walk out the door.

My unemployed peers had a great name for these events: “The Dawn Patrol”. They cruised these early in the day venues to network alongside the sales reps, financial planners, attorneys and people looking to escape their jobs in the name of professional development.  The really focused networkers would even slip out just as the program began. They got what they wanted – a few business cards and to “see and be seen”.  There was no other reason to stay.

To be fair, I certainly have had my share of moments reconnecting to people I had not seen in a while and those connection furthered my mission. But let’s be honest. It was the exception, not the rule.

So to make my networking work I began to ask if I was networking in the right places.  Too often, I discovered, I was in the wrong place to find the right results.

The wrong people: If the people I wanted to meet were not attending, I did not want to attend. A small meeting with the right people is better than a huge meeting with the wrong people.

The wrong events: General purpose events attract general purpose people. As a professional, if I would not attend the Chamber of Commerce meeting while I was working (or more importantly, my boss wouldn’t) then I should skip it.

Focus on the 1-to-1 as opposed to the 1-to-many.  It may take more time to connect 1-to-1 with the people you have met throughout your life but the effort to recruit them personally to your job search mission will bring better results than random strangers.

What is true for in-person networking is true for on-line networking.  Big groups are less important than the right groups. This may be heresy, but while it is true that many recruiters are taking the time to do searches on FaceBook and LinkedIn, hiring managers are often too busy with their jobs to support an active on-line presence. Sure, have a clean profile like you would have a clean resume when a recruiter is looking for someone like you. Use these tools to connect to old connections but know that the sites can be a bit like those networking events. Your most active players may not be the right networking targets for you.

Stay focused.  And skip the rubber bagels.

He was an older man with the rough weathered face of someone who has spent a lifetime working in the glare of the sun on the sea. He was repairing the boat docks at the yard with a few hand tools and stopped to talk.

At first I did not understand why he wanted to chat. He was working and I was trying to figure out how soon my boat would be back in the water.  Idle discussion was a distraction. But after a few minutes, I realized he was working on getting his next job. Not obviously, but with a studied casualness that was very effective.

Five Easy Jamaican Lessons to Improve Your Networking and Job Interviews:

Let’s me share with you what he did and break each part down to five steps important to any job search networking meeting or job interview. These tips are essential whether you are a boat worker or a Vice President of whatever.

Step 1 of the Jamaican’s Job Search: Like most potential hiring managers, I was focused on something very important to me but related to his business interest: my sailboat. He started the conversation by making an observation about the design of the hull and asked what I thought about it and in particular what I liked about. Of course, I love my boat so I happily responded.

The Lesson: Engage the hiring manager to talk about something important to them such as the company, the work or the profession. This small talk sets the stage for what comes next but it’s not random. Instead, it sets the stage. Be sure to skip the golf game, comments about the family pictures, or the nick-knacks on the desk. They might get a hiring manager to talk, but it will be in the wrong direction. Instead make an observation or ask a question about their work. If you are at a loss of what to say, start with “How’s business?”

Step 2 of the Jamaican’s Job Search: After a brief discussion of boat woodwork, he then told me he was born in Jamaica and survived as a child spear fishing for his own food. “I never got a chance to go to school” he said, “I had to learn through experience.”

The Lesson: Provide a “hook” to pique interest. Everyone had something interesting that tells people about their character.  Did you work for someone famous? Did you live somewhere unusual or challenging? Or grow up in a small town far away? Choose something you have found that gets you an “Oh Really?” reaction without being shocking or scary.

Step 3 of the Jamaican’s job Search: After that, he then told me that as a teenager, he moved to Kingston where he worked odd jobs to survive until one fateful day a wooden yacht, damaged in a storm limped into the harbor. He started by running errands for the yacht owners and spent more than two years working on the boat and serving as a deck hand where he learned the ins and outs of being a shipwright.

The Lesson: Link who you are to the work you do.  Hiring managers need to assess who you are, what you know and what makes you tick.  Be able in two sentences to describe your profession, something about the level of knowledge and experience and what engages you about the work. It could be about fun, satisfaction, a sense of purpose or how you define success.

Step 4 of the Jamaican’s Way: He then went on to say that his friendship with that first boat owner continues today. Just recently, he said, the owner had him visit Seattle for a cruise in the islands. The message was clear, “I am trusted, I know my way around boats both on and off the water.”

The lesson: Offer 3^rd party proof to the quality of your work.  It might be enough to talk about accomplishments but don’t forget to talk about what your boss or the company brass thought about your work. Be gracious, be humble but be clear about how the value and the quality of your work has been recognized. Recognition takes many forms. It could be an award, a promotion, a saved customer or a new policy or product implemented as a result of your innovation. The important thing was that it was recognized by a third party in authority to whom your prospective manager could relate.

Step 5 of the Jamaican’s Way: Up until this point, I had assumed that my Jamaican friend was an employee of the boat yard. But he then made a point to reveal that he was an outside contractor who had been brought in on and off for the last six years to do woodwork. He then mentioned he was available to work on boats for any number of small jobs. I actually found myself putting together a mental list of projects even though he not once asked me for a job.

The Lesson: Reveal Your Situation and offer availability. Maybe this seems obvious and it would be if you are interviewing for a specific job opening but don’t be so sure. Many times I have had networking meetings with job seekers and left the meeting unclear about what type of a position they wanted. Besides, in any job interview it is always helpful to “close” (a sales term) the hiring manager on the next step in the hiring process.  For example, “I could start in the next couple weeks, what is your timing when you would like to someone to be on board?”

Ya Mon! You’re hired!

According to the Bureau of Labor Satistics, nearly half of older unemployed workers (55+) have been out of work more than 27 weeks. (See report)

These are tough searches that require the older job seeker to be at the top of their game in today’s competitive marketplace. The issues can be unique but always. I have been quoted in a number of articles about the challenge of the job search for older workers whether their issue is age or simply so much experience they are “overqualified”. Though my quotes may be brilliant, the articles are worth a look as they not only explore the issue but offer some concrete tips to the job seeker.  Dan Kadlec’s article in this month’s issue of Money magazine “How to Age Proof Your Career” (p. 118) offers an “anti-aging” kit.  This is one of the better and more thorough fact-checked articles I have seen. Nice job Dan!

Some great networkers believe the universe is working in their favor and they just need to put their “energy” out there and good things will come. Might be true for them and it is their motivation to get out their and network. But it’s not true for me.

And, I take rejection personally.

So when I started learning how to network I struggled with asking people for help and I really wrestled with asking people who don’t know me from Adam to refer me to their personal contacts. Why would they do that? Why would they risk their personal reputation to refer me – “The Unemployed” to an important peer?

This question stopped me cold until I figured out that it was the wrong question to start with.

The right question was, “How can I conduct a networking meeting that would prompt people to open their personal contact list?” How would I ask for the meeting? What would be the agenda? What are exactly the right words to say that engages the person and enlist them in my quest for a new job.

The right questions allowed me to focus on what I controlled – me, as opposed to what I don’t control – them. This changed the game. When I asked that question, I started focusing on what I did and observing my networking contact’s response.

In each meeting I began to look and listen more carefully at the behavior of my networking contact. How did they respond to my words? If I gave them a piece of paper (especially my resume) what would they focus on? How would that influence the meeting? 

I also started paying attention to the flow and the outcomes of meetings. What could I say and do to shift from a discussion of ideas to discussion about specific positions, employers and hiring managers? What could I do that would prompt people to give up the names they knew and make introductions?

And most importantly, how could I leave the meeting knowing that if I needed to get back to them, they would respond?

It took some practice. I tinkered with a few ideas  and shared the best with my clients and my clients shared the best with me. Watch, listen and learn. It is not about them. It is about you.

After all, advertising a job on a number of job boards is pretty cheap as a percentage of your typical professional wage. 

And recruiting is only a small part of the cost of a new hire.

If an employer adds up the hours of training, company resources and the time it takes to ramp up a new employee to be a consistent productive performer you would think a little up-front investment to get the right person would pay off.  It would make sense then, to choose from a large pool of candidates to have a better chance of getting it right. Right?

But they don’t.

Seventy percent of all hires are made without advertising an opening or if employers do advertise they simply end up hiring the person they already know.

It’s not logical but it is the real world. And smart job seekers should make sure their job search takes into account why employers find and hire people when they could have advertised the openings where you, a qualified and talented person could find it on-line.

Here are the real world reasons why jobs stay in the hidden job market:

• They want to replace someone but don’t want to tell them yet.
• They stumble across a candidate they like and decide to make an opportunity hire.
• The hiring manager is too lazy.
• The hiring manager does not trust or use HR.
• They don’t trust their ability to decide among a large slate of candidates.
• They do not want to have a mob scene in their email in-box.
• They decide to check first if they can find someone good enough without spending a nickel on recruiting.
• They would rather give their current employees a referral fee for a new hire than up the budget for a raise or bonus.

This means one thing to a job seeker. Work the network. Spend more time connecting than surfing. Target employers that typically hire people with your kind of skills. Focus, focus, focus.

Why? Because this group rarely uses the phone to communicate verbally to one another. They text. They use Facebook. And if they are feeling nostalgic they might even send an email but they tend not use the phone for verbal conversations.

For example, one young woman told me that phone conversations feel awkward to her. “Sometimes” she said, “It’s hard to tell when the other person has stopped talking and I should start which creates awkward gaps and crosstalk.”  

Another one told me he found the phone to be unreliable because when you call you may get voicemail and “no one uses voicemail anymore”.

They might be right about phone conversations when it comes to their generation. Communication is different today and it is evolving at a fierce pace.  Yet there are two issues that make it important to embrace the old and pick up the phone for a conversation to move the job search and your career forward.

First, when communicating, always use the communications media most comfortable to the audience you are targeting. In a job search, you need your message to be heard and taken seriously. Hiring managers are from previous generations. They have the power to hire, they have the budgets. Use the media they use, no matter how dated it might seem to you to get your message across. What the heck, go retro and write a letter.

Secondly, the best part about phone only conversations is that they teach how to listen really well without the distracting visual and environmental cues.  My first counseling job was the graveyard shift of a 24-hour crisis hot-line. This was a powerful experience to learn how to close my eyes and focus on what was said, how it was said and environmental cues such as shuffling of papers to deeply and quickly understand what was important and what was not. Emails and texting leave too much guesswork to pick up critical nuances in hiring decisions.

People who are good on the phone are also able to package their message in a way that gets heard. This is why creating scripts and anticipating objections is so essential to a quality introductory call to a hiring manager.   In our book, “Unlock the Hidden Job Market; 6 Steps to a Successful Search When Times Are Tough”, Martha Finney and I dedicated a whole chapter on what to say after they say “Hello”.

Think about the media you are going to use in your search based on the audience you are targeting. A more dated technology could be a faster way to a new job.

Some might suggest that talking to people on the margins of your professional and social network is just a smart numbers game. More people equal more possibilities. Even if you connect with someone you have only met once at least it is another connection. Who knows where it could lead?

But there’s more to it than that.

Smart job seekers need to pay attention to a number of important insights research in social networks has revealed. As with much of social science research, it seems obvious when you think about it, but most of us don’t.  (Check this book)

For example, research shows that we tend to belong to one or more “clusters” of social networks that are more or less isolated from other wider networks.  In other words, the people you know tend to also know each other.  One sure sign that you are stuck in a network cluster occurs when networking meetings are spent catching up on what’s happening with mutual friends.

This is the sure sign that your network is not working and it is time to break out of your cluster. Thank goodness for LinkedIn. Dig deep to reconnect. Find people in your past professional and personal life to talk to about your quest for a new job.  

Think it’s cheesy to network with people you have lost touch with only when you need them? Absolutely not. People only have so much social bandwidth to maintain a network. We are not all social gadflies.

But there is an exception to this rule: If the table was turned would you would be unwilling to help a “weak tie”? If so then just stay in your own sad isolated little cluster.

I have heard this story before. It happens. Unfortunately, if you are a job seeker on the outside of the company you would LOVE to work for, it’s easy to conclude you have no chance hell of getting in the door unless it is on the ground floor pushing a broom. 

Don’t believe it. Insiders often have three serious disadvantages when compared to outside candidates.

Known weaknesses. Managers can be notorious for seeing what is wrong with someone. It’s not that they are overly negative; they are just good at finding flaws. Everyone has flaws. The manager knows the internal candidate’s flaws, they do not know yours. Point for you.

Insiders represent the” same old” when change is needed. As Isaac Asimov observed, “The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change…” If a manager needs a fresh perspective they will turn to an outsider. As a job seeker, find out what is changing so you can understand how your talents and skills can get them there. You are the future.

Moving an insider to a new job creates another problem. Sure the manager can promote Jennifer to the new job. Now they have to find someone to do Jennifer’s old job. Solve one problem create another.  And if Jennifer is doing a really terrific job in her current job, the replacement will take even longer to ramp up performance. Keep Jennifer in her job and hire you. Problem solved.