Has anyone ever asked you about openings at your company? It’s painful to say “I’m sorry” to these people, and it’s humiliating for them to ask. Networking for vacancies doesn’t work.

Well, it was fine when you were just starting your career. Jack got his stocking job in high school thanks to a friend’s dad pulling strings, and Steve got a job as a waiter by walking in and asking if they needed people. But that works only in entry level jobs. Once you have a career in mind, your friends and acquaintances are unlikely to know the right people to talk to.

Don’t get us wrong. Person-to-person job search is the preferred method hands down! It’s just that most people think that networks work on their own. They go to association meetings (usually made up of 90 percent job seekers and hopefuls and only 10 percent entrepreneurs) and ask about job openings or openings. They will distribute their resumes on the street as if they were flyers. They’ll collect business cards like baseball cards, hoard them, and wish they had some good, realistic reason to talk to those people. They expect to be reminded when a vacancy or vacancy appears.

Then there is the networking between “main” contacts. Friends, relatives, and acquaintances don’t like being forced on them; Plus, he’s unpredictable when you ask everyone you know about jobs. You can quickly burn your network instead of farming it.

To avoid this random, pool ball-style networking, you need a written and researched plan of who you want to talk to, how you can make or save a package, what’s going on in your industry that you can get into, and well thought out logic and a method to enter to see them face to face. You need a clear agenda for each meeting. You need to know how to milk the meeting for more contacts by knowing, at least by key information point, if not by name, who else you want to talk to.

Remember, your resume probably won’t entice anyone to look at it. To generate networking interviews, you need good phone skills (including knowing the three ways to reach unreachable people), a short and powerful personal profile to sell your future, and you’ll need to avoid common job-killing mistakes. campaigns These include being “open” to any kind of work; an unplanned and unfocused search; and doing it alone. You’ll need the support and encouragement of friends and family to get through the daunting times, and don’t be afraid to get professional help to help you overcome your limiting beliefs.

poor networks it is worse than not networking. Meeting people is one thing giving the right impression is another. Just because you meet a lot of people and talk to them doesn’t necessarily mean you’re approaching a new job. If people aren’t impressed, if they think you’re too arrogant, too pushy, too meek, too shy, too uninformed, not committed enough, too confused, too much, all a hundred network contacts will do is create a hundred bad impressions: it will burn bridges that you will have to rebuild later once you have your head on straight.

One client was very excited about how he “knew everyone” in his industry. When we did a candid reference check, we found out he was pretty well known, all right. But he wasn’t famous, he was infamous! He had to improve in a number of areas, including going back to everyone he knew and reviewing the impression he had made.

In some cases, you may not be able to repair the damage. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Poorly conducted or poorly prepared networking will only make things worse each time.