Those little hamsters at LinkedIn have been very busy. They sent me an email yesterday to tell me that 18%of my network had changed jobs last year. They also suggested that I might want to send a few congratulations notes.
My first thought was – holy cow, that’s a lot of change. Of course, you have to take out the people who changed their title for vanity reasons and the people who changed it and then changed it back so that they could be in everyone’s status updates. Even taking that into account, it’s still a lot of change.
Then I got thinking about thank you notes. Where was LinkedIn when I got married? How easy would it have been to send gift and shower thank you notes using LinkedIn?
But I digress. Lots of people made a change. And that change did not happen overnight. Oh sure, we all hear the story about sitting beside someone on a plane and having a new job by the time you land but let’s face it, unless you are a Google programming guru, it’s pretty unlikely that that’s how you will get your next job.
Nope, it requires thinking and research and <gasp> talking to people. Former colleagues, tweeps and vendors, are all fair game. When you start having conversations and someone refers you to an opportunity or a connection, don’t dismiss it out of hand. Pick up the phone and make the call. Explore it and then decide to cross it off the list.
You owe it to yourself and your career. Oh and if I forgot to tell you – thanks for the wedding gift. It was lovely.
Recruiter's Couch 