Refine Your Small Talk Job Search Skills
We’ve all found ourselves in that situation where someone we don’t know asks us what we do for a living. Depending on your mental energy level at the time, you may offer a job title-only response or you might go into a little more detail about what it is that you actually do for a living. In many instances, we don’t really know who’s asking us the question and we likely don’t know anything at all about what he or she does for a living. You never know when the opportunity will arise to meet someone that may actually help you in a future job search or in your current career. And if your current job requires you to hire IT contractors, for example, you won’t know if you’re talking to one unless you start to ask some questions.
The art of the small talk requires some skill, however, and nothing is more likely to end a conversation for conversation’s sake faster than a poorly crafted segue into career-related questions. Some people simply don’t want to talk about it and you have to be able to recognize that early on. But some people will offer loads of valuable career information out of sheer boredom, if the situation is right. The key is to be able to mine for some information that may be of value to you – and often times that will come simply by offering some of the same information about yourself.
Starting and expanding the dialogue is generally easy to do and most professionals understand the importance of casual networking and how it can potentially yield new opportunities. Obviously, you need to be upfront and honest about what it is that you do and be genuinely interested in hearing someone speak about their jobs – even if it’s never going to be of any relevance to your career. If you actually start listening to the people around you, you’ll likely be surprised at what you hear and learn. This is especially true when you’re searching for local jobs in your area.
When you do come across some people that you think you may want to keep in contact with from a professional standpoint, you want to make sure that you’re using some sort of effective career contact manager to do so. By making it general practice to engage the people around you in social and other non-professional settings, you’ll greatly expand your base of contacts that may ultimately prove beneficial in advancing your career and future personal job searches.
Article by, Mick and courtesy of Insourced blog
