Patrice Strachan was the vice president of operations with a manufacturer’s representative group selling IT products when the shrinking economy took her job away in 2010.
But the Midlothian woman joined the Career Prospectors job-finder group in January last year, and now she manages recruiting of accounting and financial professionals for a specialized staffing company.
“Networking was probably the best thing I did as far as landing the job,” Strachan said.
“Everyone is so supportive,” she said. “They’re willing to bend over backwards to make a connection — I never had anyone turn me down. I’m not sure you find that in every city in America.”
For people looking for employment, in-person career networking can open “the hidden job market.”
Given that two-thirds or more of positions are found through face-to-face contact, in-person career networking has flourished in the recession as the Richmond region’s unemployment rate hovers around 7 percent.
And local groups that aid those human contacts have blossomed at the same time.
According to Alison Doyle, the job-search specialist for About.com, an online provider of expert information, “80 percent of job seekers have been helped by networking.”
“You can’t just put your résumé online and expect to get a job,” Doyle said. “It’s just not going to happen.”
But “if an employer is getting hundreds of résumés and a referral from one of your connections,” Doyle said, “you will at least get a closer look, and you may get an interview.”
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Working through grass-roots organizations, personal career networking aims to help job seekers — outside of traditional methods such as government employment services or headhunter agencies — develop a set of friendly people who help one another find employment.
The meetings also have programs on topics such as working with human resource people, improving résumés, honing networking skills — and getting a new job.
While networking has long been around in professional and business associations, Doyle said the difficult job market creates a greater need for a network that can help people find opportunities.
And with government programs tightened because of the recession, “there are more organizations that are offering their services for unemployed persons and job seekers.”
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Volunteer-run Career Prospectors, which meets at Three Chopt Presbyterian Church, helps people without charge to locate job opportunities in the Richmond metro area.
In just the past three years, more than 900 members of Career Prospectors have found employment, according to its founder, Charlie Wood.
St. Michael the Archangel Roman Catholic Church in western Henrico County started its nondenominational Jobs Assistance Ministry in 2008 when a number of large businesses were folding or moving out of the metropolitan region.
Some men from the church were looking for a service project they could do in the community. “A lot of guys we knew were losing their jobs,” said Edward Landry, the ministry’s volunteer coordinator. “Maybe we should do something about it.”
The Jobs Assistance Ministry was the result.
“In three years, we know of 320 people we’ve assisted in landing employment,” said Landry, who was one of the program’s founders.
At the career programs’ meetings, members also can learn about résumé writing, short business introductions known as “elevator speeches,” self-marketing plans and Web search skills, and participate in networking exercises, résumé critiques, mock job interviews and personal mentoring.
Job seekers in the Richmond area also are using another form of in-person networking called job clubs or accountability clubs, which usually have small, restricted memberships.
“That’s more of a team approach,” Wood said. “It’s hard core.”
Club members agree to be accountable to the group, making weekly reports on their job-finding efforts, for instance, though their memberships can overlap with larger programs such as Career Prospectors.
According to Ruth McCullen, a business and personal motivator in Richmond, people who participate in a job club get back to work four times faster than those who don’t.
“It is essential that you develop friendly relationships with people who can tip you off to job openings, perhaps even introduce you to the key person who is doing the hiring,” according to the Career Prospectors’ website. “There is truth in, ‘It’s not what you know, but who you know.’?”
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Some of Career Prospectors’ members haven’t had to look for a job in years, so the group teaches the latest tactics to get a job.
At its meeting, besides simply meeting other people, members discuss what they have done during the past week to push their job searches, and then offer suggestions to one another on how to improve their chances for success.
Many of those using networking are people who are in midlife, often with management or executive backgrounds, but the job-finding networks don’t limit their services to those categories.
“I’ve had parolees come to our meetings with a parole officer,” Landry said. “Senior executives to homeless, we’ll help anybody who comes to our doors.”
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A critical benefit of networking is the support participants give one another during their job searches.
“One of the worst feelings when one is out of work is that of isolation and not knowing what to do next,” said Jeb Hockman, who experienced an unplanned early retirement last year.
But the group members are all in the same boat, said Hockman, who has since found a new position in public relations. “One of the best things is that those in the group with skills help others,” he said. “For example, I helped teach a class in writing cover letters.”
Henrico resident Melissa Gay was working as a product developer for an Internet service provider when she was laid off in 2010.
Having joined Career Prospectors, she said, “the most important thing it does is help people learn more about themselves: What your skills are, what you think is important.”
That knowledge “gives you courage to try something you truly like and would be good at,” Gay said, “to do things you’ve always wanted to do.”
And what she’s always wanted to do is be a writer, so she’s started blogging.
“But I’m realistic,” she said. “I need to pursue gainful employment in the Richmond area and work in the field I’ve trained in and feel I’m very good at.”
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Thanks to the networking in which Strachan became involved, “I found how much I enjoyed working with people and making connections. It was a perfect segue into this career.”
Strachan now manages the recruiting of accounting and financial professionals for a specialized staffing company.
Gene Wilson moved to the Richmond area from Chicago in 2010 to be closer to family members.
“I was looking for a senior-level executive position,” he said. “I just started networking and eventually Career Prospectors became, over time, the most fruitful.”
He wanted an adventure, not just a job, and today he’s the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Richmond-based Coleman Institute, which operates addiction-treatment centers across the country.
“Networking was key for me,” Wilson said, and he pays that debt forward by making presentations and doing résumé critiques for groups like the Jobs Assistance Ministry and Career Prospectors.
“I’d love to see the point where we can shut this whole thing down,” Jobs Assistance Ministry’s Landry said, “because then everybody would be employed.
“But I don’t see that happening for the foreseeable future.”
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