Graduation is near for many of the nation’s college students.  In order to prepare for this many students will be looking for jobs in all the wrong places.  Many of the large internet sites will make the list of frequent surfing.  In light of this increased amount of job searching among college students or recent college grads I ask you to consider this stat.

Last week I was the bi-annual meeting for the Career Services Advisory board of the Community College of Allegheny County in Pittsburgh.  At this meeting a recruiter from Enterprise Rent-A-Car was sitting next to me.  During the meeting he made the point that they hire nearly 50% of their people from employee referrals.  Did you catch that?

The largest employer of new college grads, 8,000 a year, said that they hire nearly half of all their new hires from employee referrals.  So I will ask again; why are you spending the majority of your time surfing Monster, CareerBuilder, and HotJobs, when you should be spending at least half of your time trying to network with current employees at the company you want to work at.  The numbers have been in for a long time, network beats every other job search strategy around.

Can you ever network enough?

In June of 2006 I was at a conference in Philadelphia. While attending a session on Science, Technology, Engineering, and math careers I met a man fromThis casual contact I made a completely unrelated conference has given me the opportunity to have my book stocked in the Delaware County Community College and is being assessed for sale at West Chester University and the entire state system of higher education in Pennsylvania.

Do casual contacts matter? ABSOLUTLEY!

Some quick networking tips:

1. Don’t throw away business cards

2. Follow up with a quick email after you meet people

3. Start your own database of contacts; you never know why you will need it.

4. Will every contact you make result in unbelievable business advantages or career advantages for you? No, but if you didn’t network at all you would never have a chance to get ahead through your network.

5. Don’t network simply for personal gain. I get much more satisfaction for helping people in my network than I do benefiting from people in my network.

Happy networking!