Strategy #25: Nurture Advisors, Influencers And Advocates

An essential part of any job hunt is finding lucrative work opportunities to go after, and with high-quality employers who really need you on their team. I've already covered the first part of this which happens when you identify suitable work possibilities by doing some essential planning. To recap, you need to know what you want in your new job, understand the reasons an employer will hire you, narrow your potential employment options and so on. You can do all of this at your leisure and from the comfort of your desk at home.

The second stage now begins as you make direct contact with well-connected people who can help fill in the gaps in your research file. This is a hands-on process when you arrange meetings, get out and about and speak with people who work inside the companies you want to join, or have direct connections with them in some way. Today’s article explains why advisors, influencers and advocates are such a vital part of your job search.

If you’ve been following my strategy series from the beginning, you’ll know that making contact with company insiders is the second of three core stages of my job-search system. For anyone who’s jumped in here, or if you need a quick refresher, the first stage is locating work opportunities before anyone else has discovered them. The third stage is taking control of the job interview and making an attention-grabbing, narrative-based pitch. I’ve explained the first stage, with details of the third coming along very soon. But for now, let’s think about the purpose of this second stage which is to make contacts inside the company you hope to pitch to, people who can advise you, advocate on your behalf and use their influence to introduce you to power players who sit higher up on the organisational tree. 

The first phase of identifying employment opportunities can only take you so far. If you’ve completed the sifting procedure that I described in article #24 of this series, you’ll have taken a big stack of possible employers and systematically reduced their number using the process that I described. In summary, you’ll have started with a list of hundreds of potential qualifiers, whittled them down to a smaller number of suspects, then even fewer prospects and a handful of leads until you arrive at just one final target. This is the organisation that theoretically represents the best current employment possibility for you.   

Now you must translate that theory into firm practice which is what the contacts phase is all about. You do this by taking the base information you’ve discovered in phase one of your research project, the raw data that has led you to your one remaining target, and verify that this organisation is everything you anticipate by interrogating people at the heart of that business. They’ll confirm or reject your judgement about this target company, so long as you do what I suggest and in the way that I outline. I do this comprehensively in my complete Job Search Masterclass, during my in-person training seminars and by way of my personal coaching programme, with an overview of the process right here.

Before going any further, I want to address a few common questions about establishing inside contacts. Why should you go to the effort of doing all of this? After all, most job hunters don’t even consider it, let alone attempt to carry it out. One reason is that contacting insiders takes a little effort and usually requires you to move outside your comfort zone, and not everyone has the appetite for this scenario. You’ll inevitably come up against resistance from potential contacts who reject your approach, sometimes in a fairly abrupt manner. Picking up the ‘phone and calling a total stranger makes many people nervous, as does the idea of arranging meetings with them and guiding an information-gathering conversation. With these challenges, amongst various others, why go to the trouble of engaging in this type of activity?

The straight answer to these questions is this. The upside of making contact with company insiders far outweighs any downside, it really is as simple as that. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh but it’s the honest reality of the situation. A crucial element of my role as a business trainer and personal coach is delivering the unvarnished truth to my course participants and clients, even if that truth is a tough or unpleasant one. You don’t get something for nothing in life, or at work, and this is a case in point.

Wouldn’t it be lovely if all kinds of wonderful job openings landed in your lap without any effort? Imagine finding opportunities that were perfectly suited to your desires and ambitions, and with employers who urgently needed your skills and experience, without any serious input on your part. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you were led straight to the door of the person who had the power to hire you, and without you having to do anything at all to achieve this goal?

Well, that’s not how things happen in the real world and you have to do the legwork to manoeuvre yourself into this enviable position. But you already understand this, don’t you? I know I’m not telling you anything that you’re not aware of. If you want to become an elite job seeker, with all of the benefits of finding well-paid, secure and fulfilling work, taking control of your working life and even developing a rarefied vocation status, you have to focus on the actions that are absolutely certain to lead you towards achieving your objectives. Part of this means you must push yourself across any perceived barriers, although I have to say that these barriers are really not very high.

With that pep talk out of the way, let’s think about the purpose of the contact phase of the transformational job search. This is all about acquiring the richest information about any potential employer you’re considering pitching to. You can measure the quality of this information in terms of its immediate relevance to the specific role you aspire to do, and that means that you have to hear it directly from people who know what they’re talking about. These people don’t write website articles or produce industry news releases or create the kind of general business data you mined in phase one of the research process. They work inside the organisation you want to join, or peripherally to it. These are the advisors, influencers and advocates you need on your side.

Deciding whether or not to make an approach to specific employers is best done with the certain knowledge that they tick all of your boxes, and with the conviction that you’re likely to tick all of theirs. Making an approach to a hiring decision maker is best done from a position of strength and nothing beats privileged and reliable information from trusted inside sources as the basis of your pitch content. You can’t get this knowledge or information unless you move within a heartbeat of the organisation you wish to join. 

Obtaining gold-standard information is the name of the game, and you need to know that it’s a game that’s played by a particular set of rules. You can’t simply waltz into a company, demand to speak with the person who’s got the most valuable information and expect them to instantly spill the beans. There are protocols and best practices to follow. Knowing what these are, and putting them into action, will give you the best chance of attracting the attention of company insiders who are ideally-placed to help you, and then exploiting their knowledge in a way that suits your aims in the best manner.

This is precisely what I teach you to do in my complete Job Search Masterclass, and through my coaching programmes and face-to-face seminars. You might be disappointed to hear that I won’t be revealing everything here. I simply don’t have the time to explain how the whole process works within the scope of a brief training tutorial, but I’ll quickly outline the procedures you need to implement.

Unsurprisingly, the top boss probably won’t take your call or agree to meet with you unless you’re already known to them, so you need to set your sights on someone who’s lower in the hierarchy, and also nearer to where the action really happens which is what you want. This might be the person who’s responsible for the day-to-day operations of the activity you’re interested in, although departmental managers are notoriously busy and often reluctant to speak with job hunters if they think a work opening is what you want to talk about.

It could be someone else altogether who’s best positioned to inform you about the challenges that the company faces. The trouble is that most businesses are primed to repel unsolicited approaches from anyone who’s sniffing around for work, or they’ll direct them towards the human resources department which you must avoid like the plague. The organisation you currently work for probably has these sorts of policies, even if you don’t get involved with this sort of thing yourself. That’s why you need to learn rule number one of the contact-building game which is to conceal your genuine purpose.

You have to play by the rules at all times, but that doesn’t mean you can’t bend them a little. In order to find willing inside contacts who’ll give you the information you want, you won’t be walking through the front door of the employer you’re targeting. Instead, you’ll be using the company backdoor by finding compliant outsiders who just happen to know the entry keycode.

In my experience, far and away the most effective way of making contact with well-placed insiders is to get personally introduced by people who used to be with the company but no longer work there. Perhaps these ex-employees moved on voluntarily but they might have been fired, retired or compulsorily released for some reason. The more recently this happened the better because their knowledge will be as current as possible.

Identifying ex-employees, and other outsiders who suit your purposes, isn’t always easy but it’s by far the most reliable method of engineering personal introductions to named individuals inside target companies. I’ve gradually honed this technique and it’s the way I’ve initiated approaches to almost every organisation I’ve worked for, as an employee and as a provider of training and consultancy services, over the past thirty years. It’s the system I teach everyone who enrols in my training programme. I hope that you’ll soon join them.  

Neil Grant, Vocation Master, London, September 2022

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about the issues I raise here, I invite you to contact me personally. Please get in touch via LinkedIn;

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