Networking 101

Network with the right people.

Networking used to be all about face-to-face meetings, robust handshakes and physically moving in the right circles, but thanks to social media, on sites like LinkedIn, you can now research, discover and network with the right people without leaving your home. That’s right, you can network from the comfort of your living room and kickstart your career by talking with the right people, finding recruiters and their companies—and making sure you show up on their radar.

How do you effectively network? Follow recruiters, business owners, hiring managers or more on social channels, engage with their personal posts and content they share, engage with the company’s social channels and generally coming across as a switched-on, digitally savvy industry hopeful. So that might mean sharing something on Facebook, commenting on LinkedIn or any other social or digital way to develop a relationship with a potential employer.

The “who-you-know” arena of professional networking can be a dense and frustratingly behind-closed-doors world. But with online social networks, you have a chance to “infiltrate” these worlds and get involved in the conversation.