Hi fellow data professional!

For my health I try not to argue with my wife; but when she told me her networking plan I had to push back.

Some context.

She’s exploring career paths within the multinational corp she works for and wanted to meet with a friend of a family member.

The catch? She felt weird about leveraging a personal connection and wanted to reach out cold.

This is the wrong approach.

Western culture demonizes nepotism but, truthfully, sometimes a connection is so painfully obvious it would be stubborn to not leverage it. Besides, over 50% of professionals report landing a job as a direct result of a personal connection (MyPerfectResume). Either the other half of respondents didn’t have a connection or were too “uncomfy” by the idea.

The worst thing that could come of this is making the connector (family member) feel awkward if the candidate turns out to be a bust. Reaching out cold to a family connection might make you feel like you’re playing “fair” but this is risky.

If you haven’t worked in a corporate environment, org IT teams create as many guardrails as possible to deter unsolicited communication. Taking the “right” path would most likely land you in the spam filter and if you have an uncommon domain like .aol or .yahoo your message might be rejected entirely.

My prevailing stance on networking is never outright ask for a job, as it puts the other party in the uncomfortable position of rejecting you.

Since you’re most likely not the child of an executive you’ll still need to apply and interview, even with a (person) on the inside.

Tactful nepotism involves these asks:

• Information on the scope/availability of roles
• “Inside info” on interview questions, including possible business quirks/problems
• A “fast pass” to breeze past ATS so you’re not rejected just because you didn’t upload your resume as a PDF

I’ve never benefited from nepotism in the data/tech world.

But, coming from a journalism background, the entire field was built on human relationships, from source cultivation to internships with the explicit goal of getting “an in.” You’d have to look no further than my career advisor’s social handle, (at)mr.connect, to see how ingrained personal connections were in us baby reporters.

Based on that imperative I made intentional connections, like cold messaging an alum who got me one of those ATS fast passes, and incidental connections, like a former intern who happened to sit next to my friend at a finance event.

The latter proved to be invaluable in providing the exact questions my interviewer asked.

Look, we know it’s a tough market. If you haven’t thought about asking your uncle for an intro to his frat brother who’s a director of dev ops at a Fortune 500, this is your permission to do that (of course, this works on a much smaller scale).

Because while you might feel weird about the reason you got your first job, your fellow candidate definitely won’t.

Don't have any connections currently? Read about the odd but effective tactic to master low-pressure networking.​

Thanks for ingesting,

-Zach Quinn

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