Many job seekers are confused about networking, and therefore doubt its effectiveness. Networking is the art of building and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships. So, like anything else, networking requires a bit of practice and finesse, but if done correctly, networking can be an invaluable part of your job search campaign.

Here are a few tips that can help develop a network that works for you:

Be Patient

Networking doesn’t happen overnight; it’s a process. Networking is not just something you can check off your job search list like “Send resume to Pfizer”.

While people may want to help you, they might not be able to do so right away.Quite simply, you may not be the first item on their agenda. So, if someone agrees to meet with you but can’t do so immediately, accept their offer graciously and patiently. Never let an opportunity to meet with someone during the course of networking slip away. Always be open to meeting!

Be Authentic and Kind

When you do meet with someone resulting from your scheduling attempts, take a sincere interest in their life, not just the information or possible assistance they can offer you. Don’t push people for their knowledge or connections and then abandon the relationship. Networking means fostering relationships. This objective cannot be achieved by one person constantly taking while the other person constantly gives information or time. Relationships are built on trust and sharing over time.

Remember, one day you might be in a reverse career position; so be considerate and respectful to all you meet. Find ways to periodically reconnect with the contacts in your network to stay up to date on their lives,and let them know that you genuinely care about what is going on with them. Also, connecting and re-connecting, take the time to let them know that their advice and counsel was heard and put to good use. Acknowledging their individual value to you and to your career. Reinforcement of the time and advice offered by those in your network will foster gratefulness, awareness of their value to you and encourage them to continue helping you and others.

Be a Conduit

Remember, the objective of networking is…well…more networking. You should be constantly adding people to your list of contacts. Always find more contacts to meet and, in turn, become a great connector yourself! Open up your network to others. Hopefully they’ll follow suit and do the same for you, keeping the cycle going. Think about those contacts who could help others in your network,then introduce them!
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Everybody would love to make lots of money quickly, working from home, and only doing a few hours of work per week. I’ve spent the past two years trying to find a great way of doing this. Only over the course of the past few months have I found any “get rich quick” programs worth buying. I’ve been trying to make money online for a long time. I had a few small websites, but they never made much more than a few hundred per month. It was easy money and didn’t require much work on my part, but I knew there were people out there doing better than I was and I knew I could do as well as them.
Now, I’ve seen a lot of “get rich quick” programs. Most of these people make claims about earning $2000/day with Google or something similarly insane. Almost all of these people are complete liars. Even if they were making $2000/day with Google AdSense, it’d be because they had high- traffic websites with a lot of quality content. I’d know, because in one whole month, I never even made half of what they promised I’d make daily with their programs. Maybe you’ve already been scammed by one of these fraudsters. Anyway, I finally got sick of what was being offered.

I decided I’d look through the all of the “get rich quick” programs I could find and see if there were any that were actually legitimate. I found that there were owners selling their programs for well over $100, but the information in them could be found almost anywhere online for free. Additionally, they all contained out-of-date information, had no e-mail support, no money back guarantees, and broken links in the downloads section.
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Hiring an employee can be a big step for many small business owners. It means the end of doing EVERYTHING yourself and passing off some of the work!

In order to make the experience rewarding for both you and your employees there are a few things that every boss and leader should do…

1) Reward people for a job well done. Its frustrating working for someone who enjoys all the financial rewards of the efforts put forth by the entire team, especially if they don’t recognize what everyone has accomplished and contributed.

It doesn’t take much to acknowledge the effort of your staff. It makes a HUGE difference in the working atmosphere when you take a few moments to acknowledge your team. People like to know that they’ve done a good job.

2) Always provide a balance between positive and negative comments. Your job as a leader is to recognize the talents of those around you and feed them with the motivation and positive energy to take YOUR ideas to entirely new levels. Help them serve you better by building up their confidence… not tearing it down.
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It is generally believed by those in our trade that while employment candidates may embellish their employment tasks and positions, they will downright lie about their education.
Yes, that person interviewing with your Human Resource Manger and other relevant executives, the one looking presentable and acting so bright and articulate may well be inventing his education. In most cases your candidate’s claim to a higher education is not necessarily a total invention. He may have in fact actually enrolled in the university listed on the resume. He just didn’t graduate from that school. Or any other school, for that matter.
But then there are those, a notable amount of employment candidates who have engaged in what we term a ghost attendance. That is to say they not only failed to graduate from the school, but they never enrolled at all. Why they chose that particular school as their fictional place of graduation is anyone’s guess. But enough candidates lie about graduating from schools they may have never seen, save for photos on the Internet. The HR person should always consider the ghost attendance a very real possibility.

As to which schools the job candidates may claim to have graduated, the selection is varied and sometimes darkly amusing. Some may choose the smaller and more out of the way schools as their fictional alma maters. They may select something arty and prestigious, one of those schools you may hear about but not know much about.. Or your candidate can take obscurity in another direction by listing on their resume some grievously remote or sub-par institute of higher learning that few ever even heard of..
There is certain logic to making such claims. By listing say, an obscure Mid-Western school or esoteric New England college, as his place of graduation, your candidate may believe he helps substantiate his credibility. Even the more astute HR person may well determine no one would actually lie about graduating from a Reed College, in Oregon, Amherst, in Massachusetts, or Lake Forest, in Illinois? Or for that matter as a defense against low self-esteem, who would dare boast of graduating from one of the legions of North Western Eastern Slippery Eel Teacher’s College in the far corner of the middle of nowhere? So, the thinking goes, you may accept their claim at face value and never bother to check it out.

Other candidates will take the alternate route. Most in fact, will choose the larger schools, believing their names and alleged graduation dates may well get lost in the bureaucratic shuffle. Of course, if they did attend for awhile, they hope their registered enrollment may mistakenly be interpreted as proof of graduation. What they lack in education, they make up for in audacity. Well, sort of.
Finally, there are the no degree degrees. These are the phony degrees awarded for “life experience” and are not representative of attendance or graduation from any legitimate or accredited college. They are totally bogus. But they are popular. The more enterprising among the duplicitous can purchase these degrees online for anywhere from fifty bucks to several hundred dollars. The graduate degrees are a little pricier than the mere Bachelors’ but they are available from any number of phony universities. Some of them even look impressive; provided you don’t look try to find the school’s physical address on the Internet.
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