What Does Curling Have To Do With Job Search?

Did you know that the inaugural Winter Olympics in 1924 in Chamonix, France included the sport of Curling?

 

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of the sport, where someone pushes a curling stone down the ice, and then players with brooms furiously sweep around it as it glides, trying to affect its trajectory and landing.

 

Now you might be thinking, “What does that have to do with job search?”

 

In a job search, there is so much activity behind the scenes that you are not fully aware of, and that has a big impact on your success.  It’s akin to those sweepers, except that you can’t see most of it.

 

Because you can’t see it, there’s a tendency to either forget, or assume nothing is happening.  That can then be detrimental to your psychology, leading to despair that your efforts are not leading anywhere.  It can also lead to doing things that might not be your best strategy.

 

One area where this is particularly prevalent is networking.

 

The optimal approach to networking is to equip and engage your contacts, without tripping that wire that is the ‘direct sale’.

 

The ‘direct sale’ here is opening a meeting asking for referrals, asking about job openings, who’s hiring, “can you introduce me to your boss?”, etc.  All of these reduce the meeting to a business transaction, as well as putting blinders on the other person that those are the only things you are interested in.  They weaken the relationship.

 

If you do a good job equipping me to know both what you are seeking and why you would be a great candidate, and build a relationship and interest that engages me, I will volunteer those things.  And that’s the real key to networking: building a relationship that leads the other person to volunteer ways to help you.

 

Now here’s where the curling analogy comes in.

 

If you do a great job building strong relationships and getting people to volunteer to help you, often there will be ‘sweeping’ going on behind the scenes that you are completely unaware of.  Sometimes it will even be someone who you would have sworn was not going to do anything, because they didn’t say anything about it.

 

I can’t count the number of times I’ve received a call from someone, or had someone attend a workshop I’m giving, because they were referred by someone else who I had not spoken with for a long time, or didn’t even recall speaking to.  (That’s also why a good keep-in-touch strategy with your network is so important.)

 

Here’s the psychology issue with networking.  If you aren’t aware of the ‘sweeping’, it’s hard to point to specific things that are happening because of your networking.  Since you don’t know, it’s easy to assume it’s not working, and to get frustrated.

 

This often leads to:

• Turning your networking into transactional meetings, which both turn off the potential for ‘sweeping’, and make the actual meetings much less successful.  They tend to become ‘one-and-done’ efforts, as you burn through your list.
• Shifting the bulk of your activity into applying to posted jobs, because you can see the results of your activity.  But those applications have a very low hit rate, and you miss out on the large percentage of jobs that never make it to a posting.

 

Think about situations where you’ve been surprised by an introduction, a referral, an outreach by someone you don’t know.  Remember that there are sweepers working on your behalf, and think about what you can do to keep that happening!

 

Let me know what you think?  If you’ve tried, and don’t feel it’s working, perhaps we should talk.