A Job Seeker’s Guide to Networking on LinkedIn

After a few months taking a hiatus, I started my new job as a Growth Associate at Curacel last week.  I began actively looking for a new job about two months ago when I started getting bored and blowing through my savings, but mostly because I felt mentally ready to get back into the job market, my last job was hectic AF. 

P.S: If you see anyone who works in a PR or Ad agency, hug them, and send them money.

In my search for a new job, I was pretty clear on the industries I wanted to work in (an Agency was never going to be a part of it) and had told my friend, Frank, that it had to be in a high-growth potential Tech startup or an oil and gas company. I also had clarity on what roles interested me, and with these, I set out to go get that JOB!

Initially, I was basically just on the lookout for job vacancies that met my criteria, paying very close attention to these organizations and doing my own due diligence (you won’t see me working for a company that doesn’t at least have a website, not in the year 2021). There weren’t a lot of these jobs, majorly because I narrowed my scope to two industries.

A couple of weeks flew by, and with two rejections gobbled up already and a couple of “no responses” from some companies, I knew I had to change my strategy, and change my strategy, I did!

I decided to start reaching out directly to potential employers on LinkedIn. It wasn’t something I’d ever done, but I knew it was something to try out, but how?

During my thinking process of ‘How to go about networking?’ I randomly remembered an event that occurred when Twitter’s Jack came to Nigeria. 

It’s a long ass story but I’ll try to keep it short.

In 2019, when he came to Nigeria, he was accompanied by a few other execs which included the; Chief Technical Officer, the Engineering Lead, the Head of Sports Partnerships,  and the Video-Content Product Lead.

Everyone was so eager to see and strike a  conversation with Jack, including those who had solutions and ideas on technical, engineering, partnerships and video content products. 

You see where this is going, yes? 

The fact is that in their bid to network, they were basically ignoring, arguably, the most important decision-makers needed by them, in a bid to catch the biggest fish.

Now that the segue is out of the way, the moral of the story for me was to try to network with persons in these organizations that I’d work directly with. 

So, I dedicated a day to scouring LinkedIn for companies I was interested in working for, identifying these person(s) of interest within the companies, and then requesting that they be added to my network list (for those that weren’t already within my network).

Next, I  composed messages to each of them, the messages contained ‘What i knew about the company; What I knew about their particular teams, and If they’d consider me for any openings available in their team(none of them had job ads out)’ 

A few days after I sent out these carefully crafted messages (a total of five), I got responses from 80% of them……do the maths!

Two of them acknowledged receipt and promised they’d get back to me if any opportunity arose in their team, two others reached out and prompted me to send in my resume(one of which was Curacel), and the last one totally aired me(lol….I still see the person posting stuff on their timeline).

In less than a fortnight after I sent out my resume, I was granted an interview by you already know who, got an offer, and resumed work.

I felt writing this post would  help people having trouble searching for jobs, and to always try different approaches when it comes to job searching. This worked for me and could potentially work for someone else; it could take a longer or shorter time as well, and if it doesn’t work for you, you should always try something else.

Be creative!