Strategy #26: Cultivate Business Insiders And Outsiders

Making high-quality contacts is a crucial part of your job search. Compliant company insiders who become a valuable part of your network will help, advise and guide you in ways that will astonish you, but you have to cultivate them properly in order for this happy situation to occur. The first challenge you face is to successfully touch base with these people before any privileged conversations can take place.

The best and most reliable way of meeting inside contacts is to be personally introduced to them by a known outsider, someone who's knowledgeable, indiscrete or generous enough to share high-quality information about the inner workings of the organisation they previously worked for, and that you’re considering as a potential employment target. 

Business insiders, provided that you handle them properly, are usually in a position to give you invaluable information about the problems and challenges that their employer is most concerned about. And trust me, every company has all sorts of issues that are causing them headaches, even if they don’t perceive them as such. Your task is to identify these problems and to inform yourself about the thinking processes of the staff members who are responsible for solving them. This knowledge will allow you to decide which way to proceed on your job-search journey.

I’ve made the following points in earlier articles but it’s worth repeating them, just to emphasise their importance. The business problem that you need to locate must be within your zone of control, meaning that it has to be something that you have the ability to influence in some way. Forget about logistics issues if you work in accounting, for example. You only have to think about what happens as a component of your particular job role. I’m sure you clearly understand this.

And next, a problem needn’t be one that might sink the company unless it’s solved immediately, that has everyone pulling all-nighters as they fight fires on all fronts. All it has to involve is an opportunity to make improvements to one of the three essential business questions that occupy the thoughts of every responsible manager in any commercial organisation. How can you help the business make money, save them money or contribute to doing things better in some way?

That’s it. That’s the nature of the problem you’re looking for. Perhaps the word problem is excessive, and I know it confuses some of my course participants, so don’t get hung up on the idea of finding major problems. Minor ones will do, so long as they tick the making money, saving money or improving things boxes. Even the smallest, most incremental changes will have an impact on the company’s bottom line and this is what you need to drill down into. This will form an integral part of the content of your job pitch which I’ll cover in a future strategy.

The trick is finding someone who’ll tell you what you need to know, or at least to confirm or deny what your earlier research has revealed. The truth is that you’re unlikely to gain access to a knowledgeable person, let alone earn their trust quickly enough to persuade them to be open with you straight away, without a little softening up. This is where a known third party enters the equation.

The best way of making contact with someone who works for an employer that you’re interested in is to engineer a personal introduction. This is a brief summary of how the process operates although, as elsewhere in this series of strategies, you’ll need to refer to my complete Job Search Masterclass for a fully-featured explanation, where you also get a range of conversation flows and telephone call scripts to guide you along the path. Here’s how it works.

You start by identifying a person who recently worked at the company you’re targeting. You do this by conducting an internet search using parameters that specify relevant criteria. Google will become your best friend, and you’ll get well-acquainted with advanced Boolean search operators into the bargain. LinkedIn too, as you take advantage of their Sales Navigator and Recruiter options if you’re serious about this activity. Yes, I know. You usually have to pay for these which is why I suggest you take out a free monthly trial when you’ve got all of your ducks lined up in a row.

What you’re looking for is the work history and contact details of a recent employee who, ideally, used to work in the department you want to join. In reality, it’s not a deal breaker if you can only find someone who used to work in a different department to the one you’d potentially be operating in, but I won’t get side-tracked by going into this here.

Identifying this person is easier said than done. Where do you start with an online search that can deliver an overwhelming number of false positives, dead ends and worse? Think about the challenge of finding a needle in a haystack. However, I’ve devised a relatively simple way of completing this task, albeit with a lot of help from a genius friend of mine who works in IT, so I can’t really take the credit for it if I’m entirely honest. You get a search tool that cuts through the background noise of this kind of project, which comes as an inclusive part of my Job Search Masterclass you’ll be glad to hear.

Run the search tool and, once you’ve got a name, get in touch with them and explain what you’re after. Again, I give you call scripts in my paid-for training programme but the essence of what you say is this. In your opening gambit, you tell the ex-employee that you’re considering making a job application to their previous employer and you simply want a little background information, just to be sure that’s it worth your time submitting a CV or resume. You’re doing this as you understand that they used to work for the company and you’d really appreciate some advice from someone who’s been there, done that and so on.

There’s some subterfuge going on here because you have no intention of sending in any kind of work application, but it’s a small lie that’s hardly worth worrying about. If the person bites, you suggest a brief meeting so as to pick their brains. How about you buy them coffee or lunch at a convenient location? When you’re face-to-face you can probe for information about the issues you want to know about.

My hit rate with this method is approaching 60%. That means that four in ten people I contact won’t play ball, but plenty will. The point of using outsiders as conduits is that these people are far more likely to divulge privileged information when they’re not employees of a company, unless they’ve signed a non-disclosure agreement or they feel unusually loyal to a previous employer. This is truly rare, however. It’s much more common to find a disgruntled ex-employee who’s only too happy to reveal a wealth of information.

They’re also likely to be closely connected with their ex-colleagues and possibly have intimate knowledge of internal affairs that you simply can’t get anywhere else. This facilitates quick personal introductions and dropping privileged information into the discussion. The direction that your conversation travels is hard to predict so you need to keep your wits about you and be flexible with your questions and reactions to their answers. Practice makes perfect and I’ll be talking about this aspect of your job search in due course.

To make this method work well you need to offer some kind of quid pro quo arrangement. You scratch their back if they scratch yours, so you should try to help them in some way in return for their help. I’m not talking about offering a financial benefit but a more subtle route of assistance such as plugging them into your network or showing them how you’re now using this job-search strategy to create a better future for yourself. This is exactly what I’ve done myself and it’s invariably much appreciated.

To round off your meeting you need to ask your contact to introduce you to an influencer within your target employer. There are ways and means of doing this which I explain in my full training programme, as you’d expect. Sometimes it takes a further meeting or two to cultivate their trust, or to expand upon the information they give you, but a request for an introduction is the absolute priority, if you feel positive about where this might lead you. If you’ve played your cards right, this isn’t a difficult proposition. I’ll explain what happens when you’ve engineered the introduction in strategy #27 so don’t think I’m leaving you hanging here. 

OK, that’s about it for this extremely concise introduction to facilitating introductions to company insiders by way of using outside conduits. It’s a method that really works, but only if you commit to using it fully and comprehensively.

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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