怎样拓展人脉

    2010年10月，希拉•塞格去哥伦比亚卡塔赫纳参加朋友的婚礼。当时，她并未想到，这次行程会让她得到自己梦寐以求的工作。那时，她还是Gibson Dunn律师事务所纽约市办事处的一名企业律师，但她一直希望有机会加入一家媒体公司的法律部门工作。

    新娘的姐姐认识ABC公司的一名律师。认识几个月后，塞格便提交了自己的简历，但她并不知道会得到怎样的结果，或者说是否会有任何结果。7月，她如愿成为赫斯特集团（Hearst）的一名律师。

    构建关系网对于塞格来说并不容易。她承认最初自己对于主动与陌生人联系也心存胆怯。她说道：“不过，一旦习惯了这种做法，事情就变得容易很多。”

    根据再就业咨询公司Challenger, Gray & Christmas于2009年进行的一项调查，我们发现，塞格的做法完全符合规则，并不属于例外情况：报告将构建关系网列为寻找新工作最有效的途径，重要程度超过了商务社交网站LinkedIn等社交网络和Indeed.com等互联网求职搜索引擎。

    伯纳德学院（Barnard College）的职业顾问克里斯汀•西恩称，她会告诉前来咨询的学生，他们必须将80%的求职时间用于建立关系网，编写简历的时间只要有20%就足够了。然而，对于那些发送了大量联络邮件、打了许多电话，最后却无功而返的求职者来说，问题不再是为何要建立关系网，而是如何有效地建立关系网。

    正如塞格最初的感受，许多人在构建关系网时感觉不自在，因为他们觉得好像是在像别人祈求一份新工作。但西恩建议换一个角度来看待关系网的建立：“建立关系网就是与其他人建立联系”，而不是祈求一份工作。

    对于那些天生不擅长与陌生人打交道的人，建立关系网肯定有些困难。比如，他们会认为这比在网上盲目求职更有压力。而且，一旦感觉之前的努力毫无成效，许多人会就此放弃。所以，第一步，或许就是降低自己的期望值。西恩称，职业关系网联络人每联系10个人，或许只能得到几个回复。她建议：“关键是要看到积极一面。如果有两人给了你回复，应该立刻跟进。即便他们的工作与你期望的职业没有太大关系，也应该去拜访一下。尽量不要被那些‘拒绝’所困扰。”

    CareerSonar网站联合创始人阿塞夫•卡齐尔也给出了类似的建议。这家网站会将求职者在LinkedIn和Facebook的联系人与互联网上海量的职位进行匹配。他说：“如果（你主动联系的）那个人感觉无法给你提供真正的帮助，但又不想说出来，他们便会不理睬你，这时求职者便应该尝试寻找其他人给你推荐工作，或继续寻找下一个机会。机会总是无处不在。”

    不要把那些拒绝，甚至得不到任何回复的遭遇放在心里。塞格的经历便充分证明了积极思考的力量。在建立关系网的最初九个月里，她估计自己至少联系了50人，其中许多都是素未谋面的陌生人，有一半一直杳无音讯。她说：“有的人非常积极地做了回复。有的人却一直没有音信。我给有的人发了跟进邮件，然后他们便做出了回应。有的人会把我介绍给其他人。回复的内容五花八门。”在这个过程中，尽量从自己的错误中总结经验，但要一直坚持下去。西恩说：“要坚持不懈，但也应该有礼有节。”如果没有收到回复，可以向潜在联系人发一封跟进邮件。因为“大家都很忙，” 发一封跟进邮件可以避免他们错过你的邮件。

    When Shira Saiger headed to Cartagena, Colombia for a friend's wedding in October 2010, she wasn't expecting the trip to lead her to her dream job. But as a corporate attorney at Gibson Dunn's New York City office, she was always looking for an opportunity to jump to the legal offices at a media company.

    The bride's sister knew an attorney at ABC, and after following up a few months later, Saiger passed along her resume, not knowing what -- if anything -- would come of it. By July, she was a lawyer at Hearst.

    Networking didn't always come easily to Saiger, who admits she was initially shy about reaching out to people she didn't know. "But once I got more in the habit of it," she says, "it got much easier to do."

    A 2009 survey by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement consultancy, found that Saiger's experience fits the rule, not the exception: The report ranked networking as the most effective way to find a new job, beating out social networking sites like LinkedIn (LNKD) and Internet job search engines like Indeed.com.

    Christine Shin, career counselor at Barnard College, says she tells her advisees that they should be putting 80% of their job search time into networking and only 20% into cranking out resumes. But for those who send out plenty of networking emails and phone calls only to hear nothing but silence, the question isn't why they should network, but how.

    Like Saiger originally did, many people feel uncomfortable networking because they feel like they are asking for something -- a new job. But Shin suggests looking at networking in a different light: "Networking is making connections," not asking for a job.

    For people who don't naturally find it easy to talk to strangers, networking can be difficult work -- far more stressful than blindly applying to jobs online, for example -- and when efforts seem to fail, many people give up. The first step may be to lower your expectations. According to Shin, for every 10 people a professional networker reaches out to, he or she may only hear back from a few. "They key is to emphasize the positive. If those two people got back to you, immediately follow up," she advises. "Go see them even if they're not working that closely in something you want." She adds, "Try not to obsess too much about the 'No's.'"

    Asaf Katzir, co-founder of CareerSonar, a website that matches your LinkedIn and Facebook (FB) connections with the Internet's seemingly endless job listings, offers similar advice. "If the person [you've reached out to] doesn't feel like they can really help you, and they don't want to say it out loud, so they ignore you, try to find someone else to refer you to the job or move on to the next opportunity," he says. "There's surprisingly a lot out there."

    Saiger's experience is evidence of the power of positive thinking and not taking those "No's" -- or, more likely, lack of responses -- too personally. During the nine months she spent networking, Saiger estimates that she reached out to at least 50 people, many of them people she had never met before, and didn't hear back from as many as half of them. "Some of those people were incredibly responsive. Some of them I never heard back from. Some of them I sent follow-up emails to and then they were responsive," she says. "Some of them introduced me to other people to network with. It was a wide range of responses."

    Try to learn from whatever mistakes you make along the way and just keep plugging away at it. "Be respectfully persistent," Shin says, by sending a single follow-up email to a potential connection if you haven't heard back. "People are busy," and end up missing emails.