How To Find Contacts & Referrals In 3 Easy Steps | Ep #769

>> Welcome to the Dream Job System, the only podcast that provides proven tangible strategies to help you land a job you love without traditional experience, and without applying online. Get ready to level up your job search with your host, Austin Belsack. >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to another episode of the Dream Job System podcast. I'm your host, Austin Belsack, and in this episode, I'm going to walk you through how to find contacts and referrals in three easy steps. In the last episode, I told you who you should be reaching out to in your job search. To do a quick recap, we basically have a series of concentric circles where the very best person to reach out to is the hiring manager or people who we think might be the hiring manager. Then just outside of that, we have folks who work on the hiring team, people who would be your colleagues and teammates if you got hired. After that, we have folks who are working in supporting roles on supporting teams, then we have people who work at the company in general, and then outside of that, we have people who just might have a connection at the company who they could introduce you to. These are the types of people that we want to focus on. But really, what we want to focus on are those first two groups, people who might be the hiring manager, and people who would be working on the team that you would be hired into. How do we find those people? Well, it's actually super easy to do. It doesn't take too much time to run through this process. What really takes time is researching the people and understanding whether or not they're a good fit for your list, and we can talk about how to do that a little bit at the end. But first, I want to dive into exactly how you find these people, and you can do it in three easy steps. The first step is to get clear on who you're looking for. We talked about finding the hiring manager or people who might be on the hiring team, your colleagues, teammates, etc. But we need to be more clear about those definitions. Let's start with the hiring manager. What specifically does the hiring manager look like? When I say look like, I mean, what job title do they hold? If your team is a customer success team and there are customer success managers on that team, well, a manager of that entire team that you might be hired onto could be a director of customer success or a senior manager of customer success, right? These are the types of job titles that managers of teams hold. So that's what we want to focus on because the person who will be managing you is a manager, right? So we want to understand what job title aligns to that specific level because that's who the hiring managers are going to be. Next, we want to understand what department they work in. And obviously, you're going to know what role you're targeting, what department you're targeting, what product you're targeting. And so you want to look through these people's LinkedIn profiles to see if they have any mention of that. So for example, if you wanted to work on the experiences team at Airbnb, when you search for these job titles, you want to look at those people's profiles to see if they mention anything about being on the experience team. Because if they're on another team, even though they hold the right job title, they might not be the best person to reach out to you because they aren't on the team that you're trying to get hired onto. So that's the next layer here. And that's really what we want to focus on when it comes to hiring managers. The same is true for those teammates, the people on the hiring team. But this is a little easier because we already know the job title. When you look at the role that you're targeting or that you want to apply for, all you need to do is take that job title because that's going to be the exact same title that everybody else on the hiring team has. Your peers, your colleagues, your teammates, they're all going to have the same job title as the role that you're applying for. Then you just want to layer in that second step of once you search for that job title, looking for people who potentially talk about the specific team that they're on, the department they're in, the product that they work on, to make sure that it aligns with your specific target. So that's the first step is just getting that clarity on job titles and on departments so that we know who to look for when we run this search. And that brings me to step two, which is the actual search itself. So what we're going to do here is head to LinkedIn and then you're going to go to the search bar in the upper left hand corner of the navigation and you're going to type in that target job title. So when I say target job title, it depends on who we're searching for. If we're looking for potential hiring managers, we're going to put in their target job title, the job title that we think the hiring manager has. If it's people on the hiring team, our potential peers or colleagues, we're going to put in that job title, which should be the job title that's on the job description that you're targeting. Then we're going to run that search and we're just going to use the company filter to put in our target company. And I recommend doing one company at a time. If you try to put in every single company, you know, LinkedIn search pulls in a lot of people and this is just going to convolute things a little bit more. I find it easier to go company by company with this process so that you're only looking at a list of people with your target job title at one specific target company. So when you run this search, you should have a list of all the people with that target job title, a list of potential hiring managers, a list of potential teammates or colleagues. And then what you're going to do is start clicking through their profiles to do a little bit of that deeper research to see who most closely aligns with the team and the product in the organization that you are trying to get hired into. And then that brings us to step three, which is doing a little bit of educated guessing. Sometimes you can hit the jackpot. You run your search and boom, that specific hiring manager pops up. They have the exact right job title. They even say in their LinkedIn headline what team they're on. Maybe they've even posted about the specific open role that you're targeting. And in that case, amazing. You have found the very best person to reach out to. But that is going to be more of the exception than the rule. So what you're going to need to do here is comb through their profiles and look at all the information that you can get and then compare that to the other people on this list. So for each category, hiring managers, potential colleagues, teammates, supporting teams, people who work at the company, et cetera, you're going to want to prioritize by those categories that we talked about earlier. But then you're going to want to compare profiles across the category. So if you have five people who might be the potential hiring manager, you want to look through those and understand or try to guess who would be the best two to three people, who would be the most relevant or give you the best opportunity of finding the hiring manager. And that's who you want to add to your list. So this tends to be the part that takes the most time because we basically not only have to comb through all these individual profiles, but we also have to compare them to the other profiles that we've seen and then find a way to determine who might be the best fit for our list. So that can be tough because we don't always have every single piece of information that we need. So at the end of the day, a lot of times you're just going to be making a call based off of your gut instinct of who you think might be the best person. And when in doubt, just add everybody to the list. You can never have too many potential contacts that you're going to reach out to at a company. I personally recommend 15 at each company because if we extrapolate that out, I recommend that people find a target list of 10 to 15 companies. So we're basically looking at a minimum of 150 contacts, which is a lot and can be kind of overwhelming for people. So I don't always just say, hey, we'll go find 30 contacts at every company. But if you feel like you can't decide between a couple of contacts and you're not just sure, put them on the list. It doesn't hurt to reach out to more people here. But if you can refine them down and if you can get a more intentional list, that just means you have more energy to focus on each of those individual contacts versus diluting it across more people that you're adding to the list. So those are the three steps. And all you need to do is rinse and repeat those three steps for your target companies to build out a list of potential contacts to reach out to here. And then all you need to do is start reaching out to these people using the networking strategies that we talk a lot about on this podcast and that I've written a lot about on my site and in my newsletter. Basically, where we're looking at this person and saying, "How can I add value to them? What can I do? What can I send them to make them excited to reply?" And if you take that approach with a critical mass, which is roughly a minimum of 150 contacts, that's basically what our data shows us, gives you the best shot of making this whole funnel work. If you do that, you are going to put yourself in a really, really strong position to not only get referred into the job that you're targeting, but get referred in by somebody who has a lot of influence over the final hiring decision. And that is going to make your networking much, much more efficient and effective. So that's it for today. Thank you as always for listening and I will see you in the next episode of the podcast.