Alec Satin’s Soft Skills Blog for IT Managers and Leaders

While I hope that you don’t need this information right now,  it’s likely that sometime in the next few years or months you will find yourself in a job search.  The Times They Are A-Changing, said Bob Dylan in another time and place.  Certainly this is true in the world of information technology job search.

You definitely can land a good job in this market.  But the competition is a little tougher.  The method here can help you better organize the contact and networking part of your job search.

What is Highrise?

Highrise is a flexible customer relationship management (CRM) system with free and low cost options.  From the 37 Signals - Highrise website:

Highrise helps you track communication and conversations with leads, employees, clients, colleagues, vendors, or anyone else that matters to your business. With Highrise you know who’ve you talked to, what you talked about, and what you need to do next…You can forward, cc, or bcc emails to Highrise and Highrise will attach them to the matching person or create a new person on the fly. You can also email tasks to Highrise.

Why Use Highrise?

Highrise is one of a number of online CRM systems.  I’m suggesting Highrise because the interface is reasonable, the system seems always to be available, and it has a strong company behind it.  Any other CRM would likely work as well.  Just beware the danger of focusing more on the tool selection than the real goal of progressing steadily on your job search.

Why not just use Microsoft Excel?

• Excel spreadsheets can get unruly quickly.
• It’s easy to ignore/forget about a spreadsheet.  They don’t easily remind you of what’s coming next.
• There are better tools for this job.

What You’ll Manage With Highrise

How to do a full job search is beyond the scope of this article.  You can find succinct material at the 5 O’Clock Club website.  Kate Wendleton’s Targeting a Great Career is a good, inexpensive book to start with on how to start a focused job search.

In this post, you’ll learn how to set up an easy system to manage the people you’re networking with.

• Those you have communicated with,
• Those you plan to communicate with, and,
• Those you have scheduled to communicate with in future.

Step 1 - Brainstorm your Current Networking Contacts

1. Make a list of each person who can help you in your search.
2. You may already be in contact with some of these people through email, IM or by phone.
3. If you have relationships with recruiters, include these as well.
4. Aim for a dozen or so people.

Step 2 - Decide on your Tags

Before adding your active contacts to Highrise, decide on your tagging scheme.  This will be used to help you  distinguish between networking contacts.  Here’s a sample you can use:

• Networking A - People to remain in contact with long term, no specific job or position in view.
• Networking B - People who would like to hire you, but have no job at present.
• Networking C - People who have an open position.
• Networking Inactive - Effectively closed contacts, no further connection planned at this time.

If you like you can change the tags to names that make sense to you.  Decide right now which tags you’ll use. Be consistent or this system will become messy quickly.

What about recruiters? Recruiters who treat you like a person and are interested in a long-term connection should remain in Networking A.  You can add or not add the resume sieve recruiters as you see fit.

Step 3 - Set Up Your Free Highrise Account

Sign up for a free Highrise account.¹  The free account should be enough for your job search.  If you choose to move all your contacts to Highrise at a later time, you will probably need to upgrade to a paid account.  To avoid cost while you’re searching, you may want to use Highrise only to track your job search contacts.  If you find that you like Highrise, you can always add the rest of your contacts later.

Step 4 - Add Your Current Networking Contacts to Highrise

1. Login to Highrise using your new userid and password from step3 above.
2. You will be greeted with the welcome screen.  From here you can start adding your contacts.
3. Add your first contact as follows
   • Select Add Contacts To Your Account.  (You can also select Contacts and then select the Add Person button on the right.)  This will present you with the Add New Person screen.  Enter your contact’s name, title and company.  Select the Add Contact Information button to add email address, phone number(s) and IM addresses.  It’s better to add as much information as you have available now.  Just don’t let this slow you down.
   • In the Info about this person box, add a sentence or two about how you know them.
   • Select the Add This Person button.  This will save the contact to Highrise.
   • When Highrise returns with the contact screen for this person, select Add Tags.  This is found under the person’s title at the top of the screen.  Enter the tag from Step2 which matches this person.  For example, Networking A.  You need to add a tag for each contact for the system to work well.
4. Repeat for all your contacts from step1 above.

Step 5 - Add Follow Up Actions

The power with Highrise comes from its ability to keep you on top of what you’re doing with each of your contacts.  Remember that it’s up to you to manage your job search.  Every time you have a contact (email, IM, phone) with someone, make sure that they have an entry in Highrise.  It can be as simple as this: “Spoke on phone.  He will get back to me by Tuesday with feedback on new resume.”  Then, you add a follow up action for you to contact them on Wednesday as follows:

1. Go to the person’s contact page.
2. Enter what happened in the note box and select Add This Note.
3. Select the Add A Task button on the right side of the screen.
4. In the Add a task about this person button, write what you intend to do.  For example, “Call Michael to find out what he thought about the resume changes.”
5. Add when it’s due.
6. Choose a category.
7. Select Add This Task.

Step 6 - Set Task Reminder Settings

You’re just about finished with set up.  As a last step select - My Info - Task Reminders and set whether you want email reminders, SMS text reminders or both for your follow up tasks.

Using Your New Tracking System

You may want to set your Highrise dashboard as a homepage in your browser.  However you choose to keep it in front of you, when you open and select dashboard, you will see your list of tasks on the right side.

As you complete each action, you may want to get in the habit of adding a new action for this contact.  That way, things will keep moving without your having to wonder what to do next.

Viewing all contacts by Tag

Anytime you wish to see all of your contacts in a particular tag (e.g. Networking A, Networking B, Networking C), just select the Contacts tab.  On the right you will see a list of tags in use.  Select a tag.  You will then see a list of all of your contacts with that tag assigned.  From here you can set or review next actions for each, or change tags as appropriate.

Now all you have to do is follow through!

This system should help you manage your networking activities with a minimum of effort on your part.  If you have suggestions on how to improve this, or if I can help you in any way, just let me know.

Wish you the best with your search.

Are you an IT Executive or Professional in NYC? I’m working to develop more long-term, mutually beneficial relationships here in New York. If this sounds of interest to you, please contact me. I look forward to connecting with you.

(Image by Edmittance)

1. Disclaimer: Please note that I am a 37Signals affiliate.  This means that I get a small commission from every paid subscription to Highrise, Basecamp or Backpack that uses my affiliate code ALECSATIN.  I’m recommending Highrise because I use it and like it. [↩]

Tagged as: bob dylan, contact management, crm systems, customer relationship management, excel spreadsheets, information technology job, job search, kate wendleton, management crm, microsoft excel, relationship management, spreadsheet, strong company, tool selection

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