By Natalie Losada
Imagine you’re a hiring manager and have hundreds of applications to go through to find the best person for the job. You start to filter candidates with the most skills and years of experience, but what about the important soft skills that must also be evaluated over interviews? Where do you start when there are hundreds of candidates?
Networking!
When hiring managers get specific advice and guidance to look at certain candidates first, their job becomes easier, and doesn’t everyone want their job to be easier? When you network as a prospective employee, you increase the chances of making the hiring manager’s job easier. As a prospective employee, you need to make your personality, goals, and strengths known to everyone in your network, who can spread the word more efficiently than a single resume in a stack of 100 others.
It’s easier said than done, but networking has been broken down into multiple achievable steps by experts like Penny Pearl, a career networking strategist and CEO of 2Actify. Her strategy involves four steps:
- Network, which is just to say you must find the people who share your desired career or interests.
- Build relationships, which is where you continue conversations to build rapport.
- Generate a buzz, which is when you make your goals and talents known so you are considered for opportunities without asking for a job directly.
- Reciprocity, which is where you utilize your skills and connections to help people in your network.
I highly recommend reading Penny Pearl’s articles and visiting 2Actify for resources for more information. However, the discussion here focuses on an often-overlooked part of networking that would benefit from a unique perspective.
Building relationships in your network can be thought of as cultivating friendships. Your network is not a single tool but a group of people that will hopefully include long-term friends in your professional world. As with your personal friends, you should share your career dreams and interests with your professional friends and learn about theirs as well. Not everyone will become a close friend, but the more you try, the more you’ll find people who share your interests, aka friends.
Providing this new perspective on networking was important to me, on a personal level, because networking always seemed forced. However, finding people with the same career interests as you can be rewarding and exciting.
In a recent Penny Pearl article, Shawn Rumrill’s progression from a PhD candidate and iJOBS trainee at Rutgers to an employee at Merck was used to highlight her networking strategy. She explains how Shawn (Dr. Rumrill as of January 2025) used the four steps of networking to manifest this opportunity before graduating. Again, I highly recommend you read Penny’s articles and think carefully about implementing small steps into your graduate school experience.
However, it was more than just following steps. In my experience, Shawn, having sat next to him in our lab and office area for 6 years, exemplifies the heart of networking. Not the robotic form of networking where people aim to connect with 100 new people daily to increase their chances. He exemplifies networking that forms meaningful connections and results in a supportive environment. Shawn understands that everyone is just a person who has interests, and each time he meets someone new he tries to find common ground. Many times, after speaking with Shawn, you'll leave the conversation feeling like the most valued connection in his life. Can you imagine meeting someone who spreads so much joy? Even on his worst days, he never lets it show to those he's meeting for the first time. Everyone is valuable, and every conversation is a fresh start.
I take inspiration from Shawn, as I hope all readers will. Combining expert strategies with this fundamental understanding of cultivating friendships in the professional world will allow you to build the supportive network you want in a realistic way. Start now – the earlier, the better – but start slow and allow yourself time to be comfortable in this new friend-making environment.
This article was written by Natalie Losada, PhD and edited by Senior Editors Antonia Kaz and Joycelyn Radeny.