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Your network is made of people. People who are not sitting around waiting to show you unconditional love.

Now that your act is together, it’s time to get thoughtful about networking.

We shouldn’t have to tell you this, but you won’t find a job without help, and you won’t get help without a network of supportive people. If you think landing a job happens with resumes and cover letters, check out this study. Or this one (PDF).

Remember this: rare is the contact in your network who will actually hire you. More common is the person who puts you in touch with someone in your target company. Or asks a hiring manager to put your resume at the top of the pile. Or simply gives you an insight to the job you’re interested in.

The gold in your network is found in relationships, and the expansion that happens when you build those relationships. Not in the immediate.

If you’re just now building your network, here’s the bad news: The most enduring networks are built when you don’t need one. Why? Because you can spot a person building a network with their own aims in mind a mile away. It’s exactly like spam in your social media stream. When someone is out for themself, they stink up the joint.

We’ll say it again: Networking is about relationships. There are people with feelings and limited time behind the contacts you make. If you’ve ever heard the adage “if you want something done, find the busiest person,” a similar truism applies for the people who will help you with your job hunt. If they’re the type of person who’s taking the time to help you, they’re doing the same for other people. It’s their nature, but it keeps them very busy with these types of activities. Honor that by developing trust and adding value.

Here are our tips for building network relationships. You won’t find the typical tips on clothing, smiling when you meet someone, or where to go to do it. These are the things that build relationships.

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Learn how to demonstrate value. Without question, we see this as the toughest corner to turn for would-be working professionals. Changing your mindset from “why I’m great” to “why I’ll be great for you” can take some time and experience. But it’s everything. If you can’t translate your value into something meaningful to the person who’ll help you or hire you, you’re at a disadvantage.

So spend some time with a friend or mentor in marketing and sales, and ask them how they’d translate your Me First declarations into something that’s meaningful to the person that’s helping you. Again: It doesn’t matter that you’re great. It matters that you’ll do great things for them. Since this isn’t always second-nature to people, you should find someone whose living depends on the ability to do it and ask them how they’d sell you.

They’ll likely spend some time also challenging you to talk about results. Another hard thing to get your arms around, but critical. All the great stuff you’ve done or are capable of doing are – without hyperbole – decorations around the tangible results of your work. Even if you think it’s small and meaningless.

“Managed the student union coffee shop” sucks. “Served an average of 1,500 students every morning” shines.

“President of the Students Against Bad Things” is lame. “Launched the first social media campaign for SABT, generating an online following of over 1,000 fans” is nails.

“Studied a semester abroad in Zambia” is stale. “Contributed research to an NGO in Zambia for clean water projects” is heavy.

Always – always - follow up with the contacts made for you. The people helping you value their network too, and if they’ve gone out on a limb to make a connection for you, it damages their network if you don’t follow through. Always take the meeting (or at least try). If it doesn’t lead to something valuable for you, it was valuable for the person who set up the meeting. Send your thank you note and move on, but always take the meeting.

Find the right person to help you. Stop wasting your time casting wide nets. Focus on developing a strong relationship with a few key people who see value and will invest in you. And in order to develop that relationship, get to know that person beyond their work role. Knowing their hobbies and interests will help you provide something of value to them. Be creative and think of the ways you can be of value. Offer to help them with work projects. Watch their dog when they take vacation. Introduce them to someone who doesn’t need anything from them. Share a resource with them about one of their interests. Find something – anything – that will make your relationship mutually beneficial.

Get someone to invest in you and stop scattering your business cards to hundreds of people who forget your name (if they ever noticed it in the first place).

Don’t forget the people that are helping you. Don’t be afraid that you will bother people who have offered to help you.  Most job seekers have one meeting with a contact, send a thank you note and then write it off as dead. Realize your value and follow up with your contacts. People who have offered to help have already seen your value and are beginning to invest in your success. Show them that you are treating that investment wisely by keeping in touch and following up consistently.

Stop networking and start volunteering. Instead of paying money for expensive networking events that are hard to make impressions in, volunteer to sit on a working committee for that same organization. Meet people more regularly and develop relationships. Add value, demonstrate what you can do. Get mentioned and thanked in front of the rest of the suckers at the event that you just saved time and money avoiding.

Learn and practice this: when networking, don’t say anything about you until you have learned three things about the person you’re talking with. This will force you to ask questions, understand, gain insight, and develop a relationship. How many people do you consider friends who only talk about themselves? Same principle applies in the professional world.

Up next:

Part 3

Tactics: Finding a job is hard work

This is a three-part series written with Dr. Paul Kosempel, leadership faculty member, Assistant Director of the Pioneer Leadership program at the University of Denver. Paul also wrote his dissertation on the topic of mentoring.

Please join the discussion. (Jill Montera, we’re talking to you.)

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Spring in Colorado is a reminder of an important life dictum. Just when you think you’re finished, ya ain’t. Life and work is a process.

A few weeks ago we had a 70 degree day on Thursday, and six inches of snow and a 60 degree temperature drop by Friday night. The parks were packed with energetic runners and smiling dogs on Thursday. Friday afternoon was a commute from hell. Wake up call.

Spring is also the time when undergrad and grad college students in their final semesters start waking up to the reality that it’s almost time to get a job. Some will start seeking internships, others begin realizing what their mentors meant by building a network before you actually need it. Damn. Shoulda done that.

Having worked at a university I still get asked the occasional favor to sit down with a student and chat about their careers. Not any more than any of us, I’m sure. But there are some things that really matter, in my opinion, but aren’t exactly easy to categorize and teach someone in a college career center. Tough-love stuff. Stuff that needs to be said but often isn’t.

To avoid the predictable and banal kids these days rant, I thought I’d turn to a former colleague, friend, and expert in this area to help me focus a few thoughts toward something productive. Paul Kosempel (Dr., if you please) has been in higher education for 15 years. He’s a faculty member in leadership studies at the University of Denver as well as Assistant Director of the Pioneer Leadership Program. He used to work in a career center and the topic of his dissertation is “Mentoring dialogues: An investigation of the dialectical tensions and management strategies in mentoring relationships.”

I’ve long admired Paul for many things, but one of them is his sustained, individual work with his students. He cares. Cares enough to know (like anyone who’s ever managed someone knows) that there are no favors in subtle and soft. In fact, it can sometimes enable. It does no one any good to beat around the bush.

So we worked together on the following three-part series. Think of it as the stuff that the career counselor wants to tell you but can’t.

Part One

The ramp up: Get your act together

You get your skis tuned before hitting the slopes. You put gas in your car before a road trip. You study before a test (meh….). So you gotta get ready before diving in to the process of finding a job.

First, stop spending money. You might feel like you deserve it after all your hard work in college. But you don’t have a job. Free yourself as much as you possibly can from financial obligations so you can focus on finding the right job, not just the right-now job.

As important, financial restraint is also a sign to those that will help you that you’re taking this seriously. That you know what it means to make a sacrifice. Why would someone want to give up their time and network to someone who doesn’t have any skin in the game?

Ditch the cable T.V. Stop worrying about your hair to the tune of $75 stylings. Park for free a few blocks away and walk. Go to coffee to network, not lunch. Do NOT get a new car. (By the way, once you get a job, you shouldn’t get a new car either. Do you really want to send the signal that your first financial decision is to buy something that loses half of its value right away?)

Then say this to yourself out loud every morning: No one owes me anything. If you think you already believe this, try it anyway.

Then come to peace with the fact that a valuable favor isn’t always what you think it is. If someone introduces you to someone else instead of helping you with the immediate, they have a good reason. It isn’t necessarily putting you off (although that will happen to you, too). It’s finding the right place for you to learn and get ahead.

Next, stop working on your To-Do list and make a To-Be list. This is a blatant rip-off from a line written by Amber Singleton Riviere in a WebWorkerDaily post. Read it.

People who want to help you can’t unless they know where you want to be. They can’t give advice about the tactic you put in front of them unless they have a sense of your bigger plans. And most importantly: people want to help people who are going somewhere, and are turned off by wanderers. They have better things to do with their time.

If you can’t articulate a basic sense of purpose, then be transparent and ask people to help you with that instead of helping you find a job.

Transition your social web imprint. Right now. Delete your party and vacation pictures. Set your privacy settings so only friends see pictures of you, especially those that were uploaded by other people.

Remove anything you possibly can that you wouldn’t want to see on the news. Or anything you wouldn’t want a creepy HR recruiter looking at.

Start dumping social media friends. In the post-college world, no one cares about quantity. We care about quality. Remove friends and followers that you even remotely don’t trust. The guy that will keep reminding everyone of your night in Vegas? Dump him. The enduring booty-call person who sends updates about their recent special friend? Gone.

Here’s a succinct post on this topic from a – let’s call him a well respected thinker – if you don’t believe us.

What did we miss? Please let us know your getting your act together tips.

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Up next:

Part Two

Networking: There are actual people behind your contacts

Then:

Part 3

Tactics: Finding a job is hard work