Gone are the days when hiring managers were impressed by cold messages on LinkedIn. With more than a billion users on the platform, it’s perhaps no surprise that overloaded recruiters are increasingly ignoring messages from strangers.
This is why recent graduate Basant Shenouda has gone back to basics, combining the insights offered by social media platforms with a good old-fashioned handshake.
After graduating in 2019 from the University of Bonn, one of Germany’s top universities, she spent six months inserting herself into recruiters’ direct messages and applying for jobs online, before realizing she had to do something drastic to eliminate the noise.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to reach the hiring manager, even virtually, which used to be a less traditional method,” says Egyptian-born Gen Zers Fortune. “It’s incredibly difficult to highlight yourself.”
After trying to virtually connect with recruiters on LinkedIn for six months, he changed strategy and used the platform to see what conferences they were posting to bring his networking efforts directly to them.
One event in particular stood out: Online Marketing Rockstars in Hamburg. “It’s a very famous marketing and sales conference in Germany,” Shenouda recalls.
“I majored in marketing and was looking to get into sales, so it was just the perfect place for the decision makers I wanted to target,” she explains. “People also came from the US, so it was a good networking opportunity.”
With this in mind, Shenouda volunteered to clean glasses at the conference to gain free entry and traveled more than six hours from Cologne to Hamburg by train with a stack of resumes in hand.
During breaks at the conference, Shenouda put his CV in front of 30-40 faces, under the premise that he was looking for feedback on it, while secretly hoping that his bold approach would only impress one recruiting manager. And after a six-month hiring process, he paid off.
“I was one of the few graduates at the conference and so it was full of opportunities for me,” adds the 27-year-old. “I dug into my resume, developed many face-to-face relationships (and this was much more effective than online networking), and got my application started for a couple of positions.”
One of those positions was in the sales graduate program at LinkedIn, where Shenouda still works today, three years later, as an implementation consultant in Dublin, Ireland.
“When you graduate you think that everyone will say ‘yes’ to you and that things will be fine. But it is a question of strengthening resilience,” he advises unemployed graduates.
“You have to keep re-evaluating your process so that each no brings you closer to the next ‘yes’.”
Target employers who rejected you
There’s a lot to be said for being in the right place at the right time, but Shenouda took a more focused approach than simply hoping to stumble upon his future employer.
Not only did she make a list of conferences that hiring managers at her dream employers would attend, but she also went face-to-face with those who had rejected her online advances, including the LinkedIn recruiter.
“I got feedback from all the companies that declined, which allowed me to reapply and receive job offers,” Shenouda says.
“It really gave me a lot of information on how to better distinguish my applications and what gaps I needed to fill to ensure I made it through the final stages of the interview.
“Traditionally people don’t reapply, they don’t keep trying and reaching out to people and maintaining a relationship.
“They [the recruiter] I thought those were great transferable skills for sales and that’s what I ended up doing.”
How to turn networking into a job offer
Even if you’ve made every effort to make sure you show up at all the places hiring managers are, that doesn’t guarantee you’ll actually get leads.
Shenouda says he showed his CV to about 200 recruiters over the course of a handful of conferences before he struck gold.
Here are some tips she’s learned along the way to take networking from just small talk into something more tangible, like an interview or job offer:
1. Talk about impact
Don’t worry if praising yourself in front of strangers doesn’t come naturally to you. “I wasn’t very good at networking before,” Shenouda recalls. His most important piece of advice? He talks about metrics.
“Now I know how to get someone’s attention,” he says, adding that it feels like “talking about impact instead of just saying, ‘I want a job’.”
Looking back on the presentation that landed her her current role, the Gen Zer says she talked about her victories during a previous internship at Intel.
Likewise, don’t be afraid to outline what you want after a conversation with a recruiter.
“I always ask the specific question: if they can refer me (for a job) or if they have feedback based on my resume or my past interview experience with the company,” Shenouda adds.
2. Listen
Want to know what metrics stand out to the hiring manager in your dream job? Ask him.
“Always focus your presentation on the other person,” says Shenouda.
It might seem counterintuitive to use the few minutes you have to direct attention to the recruiter’s needs, but it’s a surefire way to closely align your message with what they’re looking for.
“If they say they’re looking for people who can do something like a particular project, make sure you speak that language,” advises Shenouda.
3. Promote friendships
Even those with hiring powers are people at the end of the day, with lives outside of work.
While getting to work right away can be beneficial in the short term, for long-term alliances it’s better to create meaningful connections.
“It’s not just about networking,” Shenouda notes. “It’s about making friends because that’s how you get people to support you.”
That’s why he recommends connecting with people you’ve met on social media, while your face and name are still fresh in their minds, but don’t be a stranger.
Shenouda is still in touch with a Facebook recruiter he met at a career event seven years ago and bonded with over their mutual affinity for weightlifting.
“The key to any career success is always the relationships you have – that’s why I’ve always prioritized networking outside of the traditional job search method.”