Building your Reference Network (2/3)

20 July 2008 by Olivier Zara.

Post 1/3: How to manage your professional reputation

Post 2/3: Building your Reference Network

Post 3/3: Tools to build and manage your reference network

As I wrote at the end of my last post, your professional references are an asset not only in any job search but, most of all, in your career as a whole.

I hope that this post will help you become aware of the need for and usefulness of taking your disparate references and turning them into a true network: a Reference Network.

A Reference Network is very different from a Contacts Network. That’s why it’s important that you build 2 networks:

1. Your Contacts Network

These are the people in your Rolodex: all the persons with whom you’ve made contact at least once, either in person or virtually. This network will allow you to retrieve your references and be connected with the right people to find a job, clients, experts or partners.

2. Your Reference Network

This is your network of social and professional references, what we might also call your Trust Network. This network will help to boost your career within your current company, but will also prove helpful in any future job search.

Understanding the concept of a Contacts Network is easy; however, the concept of a Trust Network encompassing your references isn’t as obvious!

I. What is a Reference Network?

In life, we live and work with many people and we build trust relations with them. Our mobility (city, country, job changes….) requires that our network be rebuilt on a regular basis. Each time we meet a new person, a neighbor, a colleague or a new manager, we start from scratch with trust-building. It will take several months or years to recreate these trust links. Today, our trust relations are “intangible” since they can not be measured. They are invisible since the people who trust you are actually the only ones who know they trust you. So, it’s necessary to externalize and make visible your trust relations with people around you.

Today, the effectiveness of social networking is a proven fact. Each one of us belongs to a number of different social networks - through family, friends, school, extra curricular activities or work. But there is one network which is much more significant than the others - your Reference Network! Your Reference Network encompasses all of your networks and gathers all your social and professional references together. This network is informal and invisible but it exists! So, it’s necessary to make your Reference Network visible through recommendations and tags. It allows you to promote your Reference Network among the very people you need to further enhance your professional life (prospects, recruiters, managers, etc).

Anyone you have contact with can potentially be part of your Reference Network. It can be your managers, employees, colleagues, partners, customers, or suppliers. Recent graduates may want to include former teachers and other social references such as friends, non-profit organizations, or blog readers.

Your social references are made up of all persons from your social and professional life who can emphasize your strong points, your values or your expertise in social situations. Highlighting your skills will provide significant added value to your career. Your social references show assets that people may not have noticed in your professional career. Examples are: your creativity, your hidden expertise, your special skills, your leadership in a sports team, your artistic talents, etc. These elements are not always emphasized or they get lost at the very bottom of your CV (in “Miscellaneous”). It’s time to give them room to shine! Do you regret a path taken and want to find a way out? Use your Social Reference Network to help you out.

II. Who can belong to my Reference Network?

Take a look at your résumé to identify those persons who can belong to your Reference Network.

- For each position within your company, identify all the people who could potentially belong to your network: your managers, associates, colleagues, clients, suppliers or partners.

- For every one of your extra-professional activities, within a club or association for example, identify all the people who can contribute a relevant perspective about your skills or personal qualities, as well as shed light on the way you have performed your duties (in particular within a club or association).

Have you lost track of your references? It’s easy to connect with people who still work with you, but what about those who no longer do? You’re applying with a new company for a position which you’ve held in the past but, you’re finding it impossible to contact your former manager whose recommendation could clinch it for you. Your current manager can’t provide an evaluation of your performance in this type of position. You’re stuck.

Are you one of these professionals who lose their references over time? If this is the case, now’s the time to take action!

Here are some possible search options to help you retrieve your references:

- Search engines or directories targeted at finding people: CV 2.0, Spock, Ziki, Ziggs, Zoominfo, Wink, Yoname or Naymz.

- Social networks: Facebook, Copainsdavant, Viadeo, Linkedin, 6nergies, Tribe or Ecademy

- White pages in normal phone books, even though these are not very efficient if you don’t at least know the current city in which the person lives.

- General search engines such as Google: type in, in quotes, the « first name last name » of the person you seek. If this search yields too many results, try adding distinctive elements to your query: university, company,… To find their email address, type in « first name last name mail » or « first name last name @ » (this will limit search results to pages which feature e-mail addresses).

In theory, your whole professional circle could belong to your Reference Network. However, you don’t trust everyone indiscriminately and the reverse holds true as well. That’s why you need to define a sphere of trust!

III. Knowing how to define a sphere of trust

To quote an excerpt from an earlier post on our digital lives: You can trust someone to do certain things but not others. A Formula 1 driver is a priori someone you can trust to drive a race car. But would you ask him to build your house? The trust you place in a person isn’t absolute; it is context-specific. With each person in your reference network, you must define a “context of trust” (a “sphere of trust”) with respect to roles, abilities or personal qualities. You can not say you trust someone without specifying the context in which you trust them.

For example, here is how Jack could define his context of trust with respect to his colleague Martin (defining what is inside and what is outside the sphere of trust):

-> Jack trusts Martin when it comes to managing a team, marketing and creativity (roles, abilities and personal qualities within Jack’s sphere of trust regarding Martin)

-> Jack doesn’t know whether he can trust Martin when it comes to managing a project, maintaining computer systems or when it comes to his loyalty towards the company (outside Jack’s sphere of trust)

-> Jack doesn’t trust Martin when it comes to managing innovation, accounting or when it comes to his punctuality (outside Jack’s sphere of trust)

In summary:

My Reference Network or Trust Network = People I trust and people who trust me (mutual trust).

With each person within your reference network, you define a sphere of trust. This sphere of trust can include roles, areas of expertise, abilities and personal qualities. These elements serve as the basis for the trust you place in a person within your network. They will be described through recommendations of your references, either verbally (during interviews with recruiters) or in writing (letters of recommendation). Inversely, outside the sphere of trust, you’re not comfortable saying you trust this person.

You can find numerous tools on the internet to help you build your networks (both contacts and reference networks). The internet is itself a network of networks, and social networks are a natural outgrowth of these. In the next post, we will take a look at general (Linkedin, Viadeo, Ecademy…) and specialized tools for managing your references and recommendations (CV 2.0, Repvine, Naymz,…). Tune in next time!

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