The Importance of Referees in Job Search and How to Use it to Your Advantage
For a young graduate seeking to land his first job it is always a challenge to get influential referees to endorse your CV. Many young graduates do not seem to understand the importance of referees hence they use just about any name they know as their referee.
Your referee is supposed to be a highly respected person (especially in your prospective career field) who is directly or indirectly willing to vouch for you if the need arises. What this means is that it will be helpful if your referee is someone with a reasonable amount of respect or accomplishments in the sector.
The problem then is how does a young, inexperienced graduate job seeker get endoresed by the relevant referees in his industry.
How to Build Up relevant References
Getting good referees can’t be done by staying indoors and doing nothing. You get in contact with people who can endorse for the job by getting involved in industry conventions, conferences and workshops and getting yourself introduced to such people that can help you.
LinkedIn Connection
The arrival of the professional networking platform has helped make things easier for young graduates who either wish to get referees for their career prospects or get useful endorsements and collaboration from more experienced professionals for the ir business advancement. As a young gradaute starting his own company Linkedin was very helpful in meeting experienced professionals who helped take my ideas tio bigger levels.
On Linkedin you can easily ask for and get endorsements from seasoned professionals in your fieldthat you can use in your CV and job applications. However just like anything valuable you will have to work to gain the confidence and respect of such people to enable them release their endorsements without hesitation when you ask for it.
Offer to Work for Free
One way to get people that matter to attest to your professionalism and even put in good words for you in the right places which can result to good job offers is to offer your services for free to the target individuals or companies. If you are courageous enough to offer to work for free most times you will not be turned down. More often than not when they see how capable or how willing you are to learn you will end up being offered a place once any vacancy occurs.
Paul runs an innovative tech company that owns some of the fastest growing tech startups in Nigeria. You can follow him on Twitter here
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