News

WIFT?

The best thing you can do if you’re looking for a job is to network and get any meeting you can. But as Phil Rosenberg points out on reCareered, it’s not all about you:

Chances are your new contact is a busy person who doesn’t have much spare time on their hands. You as a job seeker have a very real reason you want to have coffee – you want their help in finding a job at their company (What’s in it for me – WIFM). But what reason do you give your contact? What’s in it for them (WIFT)?

Don’t forget that effective networking means you need to bring something to the table.

Exactly—WIFT?

Don’t forget that to be effective in your networking, you need to bring something to the table as well. What can you offer the other person? Do you have information or other contacts that might be valuable to them? Your meeting may simply be an act of generosity on their part, or it may serve their own goals around helping people. In other cases, you can help build your value—a key factor in getting closer to a job—by being a resource to them. Just be careful of coming across too sleazy. The scratch-my-back tack can get a little icky if you overdo it.

Here are some more informational interview tips from Rosenberg we found useful:

• Make information your goal. You‘re giving information to get a meeting. What do you want in return? Don’t you want to learn more about your target company? Use your meeting to understand your target’s problems, challenges, goals, roadblocks. Find out how these issues affect your target department. Don’t waste your contact’s time to ask for names – you can get names from Linkedin, ZoomInfo, or Jigsaw.
• Don’t fool yourself, unless it’s a close friend, your contact isn’t meeting with you because they can’t wait to help you. They are meeting with you because you have something they need – information.
• Almost any person who has received a favor will want to return it and will likely ask what they can do for you? Have your contact ask you, rather than you asking them. You’ll have a higher success rate in getting information, and you’ll get better information from your contact, if you make the discussion WIFT.
• I advise my clients to resist the urge to bring a resume to an informational meeting. Again, this sounds counterintuitive, but it’s not to a candidate’s advantage to have this be an informational interview – interview means job, resumes for jobs get passed to HR at most companies. Make this a meeting, and make it WIFT.

Right. In the end, it’s all about WIFT.

Read the full piece here.

Tags: jobs, networking