Follow-up, and nurture relationships. These are two things that every career professional says you must do. It’s easy to do this in the first week of your job search. But once you have a good 50 people you’ve been networking with (note, I didn’t say 50 people in your network…. there is a big difference!), and more informational interviews scheduled, you have enough follow-up obligations to make your head spin.
So, you stop following-up. You wonder if you should (a) contact a new person and have the first conversation with them, or (b) follow-up with the 50 people you’ve talked with in the last month.
This is a real quandary for job seekers. One is to add another person to the list of people you “should” follow-up with, and the other is to open that box and reach out to dozens and dozens and dozens of people… what do you say? What did you say last time? How long has it been since the last communication? Where you supposed to do something and report back to them? Are you going to mistakenly repeat the same message you sent them last month, because you forget you had talked to them?
Those are questions that might cause you to not follow-up… because you feel ill-prepared. But neglecting follow-up is a poor habit to create in your job search. You need people to help you, and you need to have multiple touch-points with them so they can (a) trust you, and (b) understand who you are and what your brand (or value proposition) is.
There are various follow-up tools in JibberJobber. As I mentioned this week, JibberJobber is more than a repository where you collect and record data… it’s a tool to help you make use of that data, and move towards your goals. Following-up with people is a big part of that.
This has been a part of our vision from the very beginning… and as we’ve grown to understand the needs of a job seeker, networker, and career manager, we’ve figured out more ways to make JibberJobber more of a foll0w-up tool for YOU.