Two months ago, I started my new career as a credit analyst at a commercial bank. While I had been a credit analyst before, I was never a credit analyst a bank.
I was able to switch from a niche industry (insurance) to a bigger industry (commercial banking) in a recession.
How did I do it? It all starts with relationship building.
A few years ago, I made a goal to go to lunch with a new coworker every week. Around the same time, our department hired a new manager. She and I ended up going to lunch a couple of time, and I didn’t think much about it other than practicing relationship building.
A year later, she moved to commercial banking. That started a wave of analysts moving to commercial banks. At the time, I wanted to build a tenure at my current company. If you read my previous post, I was also making an internal move of my own, so I didn’t seriously explore commercial banking as my next career move yet.
At the same time, I kept in touch with the manager that departed, sending her an email once every 6 months for 3 years.
In early 2019, she poached one of the team managers at my old department. I asked for his number and started connecting with him in late 2019 about the bank.
By mid-2020, I was ready to make that move after chatting with many former coworkers and evaluating my growth prospect at my current company. Serendipitously, a few days after connecting with her again, she let me know that someone in her team retired, and the rest was history.
While having the right credentials is important, very few jobs are exactly the same in different companies, let alone industries. Experience at one job doesn’t always translate completely to another job. There are new systems and processes to learn.
As a candidate, you want to know your future managers or coworkers ahead of time so you can evaluate if that company is a good fit and onboard faster once you are in the job.
But don’t think of it as taking advantage of people. On average, it takes a few months to hire and a few more months to onboard an employee, and often hiring managers have only an hour to interviews a candidate.
So would a hiring managers want to hire someone that they already know are productive or to take a risk on someone they interview for only an hour?
Applying and interviewing jobs are as exhausting as evaluating and hiring candidates or working extra hours when someone leaves. Building relationship via a cup of coffee or lunch helps both you and your future coworkers or managers.
If you want to create opportunities for a more fulfilling career, it never hurts to start building relationships with others (it can be at work or outside of work), especially if you aren’t immediately asking for job opportunities 10 minutes into the meeting.
Relationship invariably plays a role to all the positions I have gotten in my life (I have had 6 positions in my 10-year professional career). You may need to wait for my second post, or third post depending on how wordy I am, for how I got my previous 4.