A Short Guide to Online Networking

If you have a pulse and internet access, do this regularly - ideally once a month

I’m going to give up the main point of this article up front: Good networking, in any format (online, in-person), is about building an authentic relationship with someone. It’s not a quid pro quo or transactional relationship.

I’ve sent out hundreds of cold requests for all sorts of things - customer interviews, expanding my network at a company I want to work at, finding potential investors and advisors, and informational interviews, and I’ve seen what works and doesn’t work. Here’s what I’ve learned. Forewarning: some of these opinions may be unpopular.

Read this first if you’re reaching out for a referral

I’ve received a lot of LinkedIn mail from prospective candidates looking to break into the industry. I’ve been there - it’s tough out there and a referral from the right person can change your life.

This is usually how I screen cold reach outs and basically what others I’ve talked to also do. Off the bat if I don’t know you and you ask me for a referral, there’s a 99.99% chance I’m not going to respond.

Here’s the thing about cold reach outs - if you’re a young college student reaching out in the same industry, we have a pretty good sense of what you want. We know you’re probably on the first or second job grind, you’re hard working, resilient, willing to learn anything, willing to grind nights out to fill skill gaps, and you’re looking for a job. Asking for a referral is asking someone to stake their reputation on the verbal promise that you are those things - from someone who stands to gain a lot by lying about these strengths. And maybe more importantly, the people referring the prospective candidates don’t want to spend the time trying to suss out those traits - that’s the recruiting team’s job.

The recurring theme for this essay and for almost any professional pursuit, as seen above, but I’ll repeat it here — it’s about building a relationship with someone. A core tenet of relationships is a feeling of trust. It’s about emotional honesty and being vulnerable and honestly, it’s not as high stakes as it sounds. It’s not like you’re meeting my parents and need to be accepted into my family. You don’t need to be a hero in the eyes of the connection — you just need to show that you’re willing to spend extra time to build a genuine professional connection with someone (for anything more than a professional connection, please refer to this thread). In an ideal scenario, that means hiring you makes me look good. If you treat me with authenticity and professionalism, I will immediately believe you will treat our coworkers the same way.

The TLDR - is asking for a referral off the bat really a sign that I’m not genuinely interested in a connection with you? It’s possible, which means I’m instinctually put off because I’m unsure of your intentions. Opening with that is a signal that this is the true goal of reaching out rather than building a professional relationship, earning my trust, and spending time learning if the company is a good fit for you.

Good Example

Hi Naren,

I hope you’re doing well! As a fellow UW-Madison alum, I’m excited to connect with you. I’m currently exploring opportunities in AI and came across the AI Engineer roles at BCGX. Given our shared background and my interest in AI, I would love to hear about your experience at BCGX and any insights you might have on the team or the role.

Looking forward to connecting!

Why this is great:

• Started with recognizing similar traits - we both went to school at UW Madison, both have studied or are involved with AI (ok I know that’s super broad but doesn’t really matter).

  • This shows the person took the time to read my profile and online presence.

• Clearly explained the goal: the individual is exploring opportunities in AI engineering and demonstrated a curiosity to learn about BCGX.

  • This shows the individual is truly trying to gauge fit with the company rather than take a referral from anyone willing to give them a glance.

• Made a clear ask: the individual wants to connect rather than receive.

How this could be better:

• Connections are good but vague. You want to be upfront about the medium of connection. Ideally this is a phone/video call. Emails don’t get read as much anymore and the surface area for a connection is low.

  • S-tier connection: in-person over coffee

  • A-tier connection: Video call

  • B-tier connection: Phone call

  You might be thinking — isn’t a call time consuming and therefore inconsiderate? Maybe — but I don’t have to take it if I don’t want to and that’s the magic. If I don’t feel cornered into something like, oh I don’t know, a referral request, then I’m more likely to oblige you. This isn’t just me — it’s human nature. Allowing someone to choose something has a higher success rate. Moreover, for a genuine connection with someone willing to learn and curious, I’m willing to take time to hear you out and help!

Here’s the modified request:

Hi Naren,

I hope you’re doing well! As a fellow UW-Madison alum, I’m excited to connect with you. I’m currently exploring opportunities in AI and came across the AI Engineer roles at BCGX. Given our shared background and my interest in AI, I would love to hear about your experience at BCGX and any insights you might have on the team or the role.

Are you free for a call? Happy to connect over email if you’re busy!

Bad Example

Dear Naren Chaudhry,

I hope this message finds you well. I am **********, a Master’s student in Computer Software Engineering at *******************, specializing in cloud technologies. I am reaching out to request your referral for the Software Engineer Internship at BCG X for Summer 2024.

Why this is bad:

• Basically, there’s no attempt to form a connection. It’s a favor from a stranger I don’t know.

How this could be better:

• Make an attempt to show you are: (1) researched, (2) curious, (3) interested in a professional connection with me instead of a one-way transaction.

  One way to show you are well-researched and curious is by researching the connection’s background and by demonstrating curiosity about the connection and your own growth.

If you’re reading this and fuming:

My post might come off as unsympathetic and standoffish. Maybe you’re thinking:

Why on earth should I care about making a connection with you! I’m just trying to get a job and look after myself. I have literally hundreds of jobs to apply to and I don’t have time to form a connection with you. I just need someone to refer me to give me a job! I’m not asking for a lot. There’s almost no downside for you but all the downside is on me!

I’m not indifferent to the suffering of prospective candidates. After graduating with 2 degrees in biomedical engineering, I didn’t get a career job for 10 months - this was around the time the pandemic was starting and the job market grew cold. I reached out to 2-4 people a day, applied to hundreds of jobs, and went for several interviews with no job in sight.

From the perspective of someone receiving a referral request, I/we see about 10 of these per week. It’s not about the downside for us - it’s literally just numbers game. There’s just not enough time to devote the attention to each of these candidates. Building a genuine connection is going to take more time but with a much higher success rate.

Reach-outs for rebuilding old connections

In my experience, this is much trickier. You don’t want to come off as someone that only shows up when they want something. Even if in some cases that might be true, once again, it’s about making an effort to build/rebuild a genuine professional. Like reconnecting with an old friend, the goal is to help the connection remember why you had a relationship in the first place - it could be a shared experience, a professional pursuit you share, or a subject you’re both interested in growing in.

Here’s an example re-building relationship message I sent to a mentor of mine I’d lost touch with:

Hey *****,

Hope you’re doing well. I was hanging out with some friends involved with the ***** accelerator and it made me think of some of the work you were doing ***** a few years ago. How’s that going - is that still going on?

Monthly cold reach-outs have enormously benefitted me. Maybe they could benefit you too?

With the exception of some very specialized jobs or highly insulated industries, the market moves too fast to not generally keep a pulse on things. One cold reach out a month is extremely beneficial for a few reasons:

1. With the right connection, you can acquire new perspectives on areas you’re trying to improve on or even further sharpen areas you thought you couldn’t improve anymore.

2. You can keep a pulse on your market value. Professor Scott Galloway once said, “You find your market value and value to your company when your foot is out the door”. I think it’s best not to find out what the number is when you’re about to start the job search process.

3. The potential to learn something completely unexpected. This is like the “I’m feeling lucky” button for the professional world. You just don’t know what you’re going to learn. What if the person you’re connecting with can help you learn a new skill? Or is someone who’s life you can change professionally? There’s too many possibilities!

One caveat - I’m a social person so this is a fun experience for me. For people that aren’t as socially inclined, this can feel like torture. That’s totally fair and I’m open to hearing other ideas in the comments if people have more to add. I personally can’t think of a more effective activity for maintaining what I’ll broadly call, professional freshness than semi-regular cold reach-outs. Sure there are networking events, interest groups and online forums, but that 1:1 connection is rich. Unless the events make time for a 1:1 connection, I’ve found it quite hard to build meaningful relationships with other methods.

What medium should I use?

I’ve had the most success with these platforms in order of success rate:

1. LinkedIn

2. Slack/Discord

3. Reddit - crazy, I know

LinkedIn, despite the endless memes…

making fun of the subtle buttoned-up corporate 1-upping and the dramatic anecdotes about people turning normal life things into sermons on achieving your dreams, is where I’ve had a majority of my success. Ultimately, it’s because:

1. I can target the exact person that I want to talk to. Back when I was trying to decide if I should pursue a career in acting, I looked for Engineers at Google who had an acting career. I found 3, reached out to them, and had a phone call with one of them.

2. There’s mutual verification of credentials. I know the credentials can be basically made up but it’s a risk you take. And honestly, I can kind of tell. If a 21 year-old has this in their bio:

| Certified Cloud Infrastructure Expert | 5x engineer at Google | Scrum Master | Forbes 30 under 30 | Early Engineer at YC Startup |

I’m likely not to reach out. I mean I might be wrong and it could all be true but why take the risk when other bios don’t look like they’re overtly selling themselves. By the way, we’re all selling ourselves in some way so that might sound contradictory. But self-proclaiming as a 5x engineer is unverifiable and a little strange to announce about yourself. And yes, this is a real bio that I de-identified so it couldn’t be searched and the young professional couldn’t be discovered!

Slack/Discord is where you can find really smart people…

engaging with their subject. They’re passionate enough to require a public outlet to share and engage. In my experience, there’s a higher concentration of folks working on the cutting edge of their subject in this place. Of course there’s others but as far as accessible forums, Slack/discord is pretty good.

Reddit is a choose-your-own-adventure…

game where if you end up getting catfished by the Prince of Nigeria, or a crypto pyramid scheme, it’s kind of part of process? I’ve been really lucky with finding great folks on Reddit but I won’t be the first to tell you — with AI-powered bots roaming the internet, having a discerning eye around data privacy is pretty important here.

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I hope that was helpful - let me know what you think in the comments!