Mark Cummuta has been chronicling his job search on the CIO eZine for quite some time and I have enjoyed most of his posts. One of his most recent really got me to thinking about my business, the importance of relationships and how many people take this for granted.
I have been blessed with the opportunity to develop many good personal and professional relationships as a Recruiter. These have been honed over time and have helped me to be successful. When I started recruiting in the early '90's, all of my contacts were in a rolodex and resumes were stored in file cabinets. When working on searches for clients, I would attack my rolodex of contacts and network, network, network. The phone and the fax were my main tools of the trade. Even email was not as widely utilized.
Now we're in the era of social networking and relationships are measured by the number of connections you have on LinkedIn. There are a lot of people who are 'connection aggregators'. But I never really understood what this achieved, unless you are able to take advantage of the opportunity and build real relationships with the people you connect with.
Building strong relationships is one of the real keys to success, professionally and personally. If everyone had the ability to build and maintain these strong ties then I, and many other people in my profession, would be out of a job.
Quality, not quantity people. And if you're really interested in building better relationships, read this book.
