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)?

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…

Easy Etiquette, Recession Approved

You may have lost your job recently, but that’s no excuse to lose your manners, too. Of course, with so many friends and family members struggling with unemployment and financial woes, you may not be sure exactly what proper etiquette even entails anymore.

After all, who’s supposed to pick up the check at dinner now that all of your i-banker friends aren’t feeling so flush? And when is the right time to start networking at a party? Today’s recession is quickly changing all the rules, and bringing up questions that no Miss Manners book in the library is ready to answer.

Luckily, a bevy of “etiquette experts” have been doling out recession-friendly advice over the past few weeks and putting together some general guidelines…

Clear Fear from Your Career and More

There’s more fear than usual floating around these days. Fear about savings, spending, housing, but most of all fear about work—and that holds true whether you’re unemployed or looking, employed and scared about losing your job, or just plain stuck.

On March 31, motivational speaker Gabrielle Bernstein will give a lecture for women, Clear Fear from Your Career, with step-by-step advice on how to remove the psychological blocks that hold you back. Full disclosure: She’s a friend. But that also means we’ve experienced her workshops. Aimed mostly at women in their 20s and early 30s, they’re positive, practical, and have a strong spiritual element.

If it sounds too heady for you, you can’t make it, or you’re a man, there are plenty of other career events coming up in New York: