CVs and Interviews

I have started to answer career, interview and CV questions on Linkedin offering free advice jobseekers and employers. Below is on recent Linkedin question and answer relating to cold calling. Cold calling can be a useful tool to land your next job. If you want other free career advice you can follow me on twitter

How do you get used to the idea of “Cold Calling” to help build a network?

I agree with Richard that Cold Calling is probably the least effective tool but sometimes desperate measures require desperate means. I am a rejection junkie BUT still hate cold calling even though I have developed some very good contacts and business from this strategy.

I guess the biggest hurdle is fear of rejection. What does rejection mean in your situation? You don’t have a job. You phone up a cold lead and he/she slams the phone. Guess what you still don’t have a job. You are no worse off. Rejection will not make you any worse off. Expect some rejection so it won’t be a shock – it is likely that you will be told to “go forth and multiply”

Remember that even though the ultimate goal is to get a job any valuable information you acquire to keep up momentum is a success. This means you can still achieve a positive outcome from your call without actually landing a job. For example another networking lead, important industry information and possible networking opportunities. This will mean that rejection isn’t fully rejection.

What to say – there are loads of creative angles and I love humour ….. My first job was in recruitment in London for a US firm. The MD was a very inspirational guy. I was struggling once and he pulled me aside and told me a story. When he was doing my job in US he was trying to break a large account. Rejection followed rejection followed rejection. No matter what intro or angle he used nothing worked. One day he landed a big deal and was high as a kite and decided to target our old friend – the nightmare decision-maker at the large account. It went something like this ….. Hey John its Greg from Made-Up Resourcing. Listen before you hang up I just want to say that I have had a great day, landed a huge deal and I am feeling on top of the world. I decided to call you so that you could bring me back down to earth. What followed – Short silence, laughter – New Business …..

You could also try asking for advice rather than a job. From experience people love to talk about what they do and are flattered when perceived an expert. You can be informing the contact that you are job hunting without physically saying the words “do you have any jobs?”

Paul Mullan Linkedin Profile

Tags: Cold Calling, Linkedin, networking, Paul Mullan

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 11:46 am and is filed under Career Coach, networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.