Networking events are for people who enjoy the sound of their own voice and the taste of lukewarm Chardonnay. There, I said it. I spent the first five years of my career thinking that if I didn’t show up to the local “Young Professionals” mixer or some industry conference at a Marriott, I’d be stuck in middle management forever. I was wrong. Completely wrong.
The truth is, those events are mostly populated by people who want something from you, not people who want to build something with you. It’s a room full of sellers and no buyers. I remember this one time in 2017—I was in Chicago for a logistics summit—and I tried to strike up a conversation with a VP of Operations. I’d practiced my “elevator pitch” for three days. Halfway through my second sentence, he looked at my name tag, saw my title was just “Coordinator,” and literally turned his back to talk to someone else. I spent the next twenty minutes in a bathroom stall checking my phone just to feel like a person again. It was pathetic. I haven’t been to a single “event” since.
The night I realized I was doing it all wrong
After the Chicago disaster, I decided to stop trying to “work a room” and started trying to work a keyboard. I realized that the people I actually wanted to know—the ones doing the interesting work—weren’t at these mixers anyway. They were busy working. Or they were at home with their families. They definitely weren’t standing around a high-top table trading business cards with strangers.
I started what I call the Sniper Method. It sounds aggressive, but it’s actually just about being precise. Instead of meeting 50 people poorly, I decided to meet one person well. I began sending one—just one—hyper-specific email per week to someone whose work I actually respected. Not a “can I pick your brain” email. God, I hate that phrase. It sounds like you’re a zombie. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently: I sent them a note about a specific problem they solved or a piece of work they did that actually impacted me.
“Networking isn’t about collecting names; it’s about being the person people actually want to answer an email from.”
I tracked the results of this over 12 months. I sent exactly 42 emails. Of those 42, I got 5 replies. That sounds like a failure, right? Wrong. Those 5 replies led to three job offers over the next four years and a seat on a non-profit board. A 12% success rate is better than a 0% success rate at a cocktail party where everyone forgets your name before the appetizers are gone. The math doesn’t lie.
The “Sniper” approach to digital outreach
If you want to do this, you have to stop being generic. Most people on LinkedIn are just noise. I’ll be honest, I think 90% of the “thought leadership” on that platform is absolute garbage written by people who haven’t held a real job in a decade. I know people will disagree with me, and they’ll say you need to “post daily to stay top of mind,” but I think that’s a recipe for becoming a professional annoyance.
Here is how I actually do it:
- Find the specific person: Don’t email the CEO. Email the person two levels above you who is actually doing the work.
- Mention a specific detail: “I saw your talk at the 2022 supply chain expo” is okay. “I tried the inventory tracking method you mentioned in your 2022 talk and it cut our lag by 15%” is a god-tier opening.
- Ask for nothing: This is the part people mess up. Don’t ask for a job. Don’t ask for a referral. Just tell them you liked their work and leave it there.
- The follow-up: If they reply, then you can ask a specific question. Not before.
I once spent three months following a lead developer at a firm I liked. I didn’t message him. I just followed his open-source contributions. When I finally emailed him, I pointed out a specific bug I’d found in a side project he’d posted on GitHub. He replied in ten minutes. We had coffee two weeks later. That’s networking. No name tags required.
Why I refuse to use Calendly and other hills I’ll die on
This is going to sound petty, but I have a rule: if I’m trying to build a relationship with someone and they send me a Calendly link to “find a time,” I usually just stop talking to them. I know, I know—it’s “efficient.” But it feels like I’m booking a dental cleaning. It’s clinical. It says, “My time is significantly more valuable than yours, so you do the administrative work of fitting into my life.”
If you want to build a network from scratch, you have to be the one to do the work. You offer three specific times. You do the time zone conversion. You send the calendar invite. You make it as easy as possible for them to say yes. Efficiency is the enemy of intimacy, and professional networking is just a weird form of intimacy. Anyway, I digress. The point is, don’t treat people like a ticket in a queue.
I also have this weird, probably irrational loyalty to my physical Moleskine notebook. I’ve bought the same $22 black hard-cover notebook every year for a decade. I refuse to take notes on a laptop during a meeting. I don’t care if it’s slower. It shows the other person I’m actually looking at them and not checking my email. People notice that. In a world of distracted people, being the one person who actually listens is a competitive advantage.
Just be a person, not a “connection”
We’ve been conditioned to think of networking as this transactional thing where you swap favors like Pokémon cards. It’s gross. I actually tell my younger colleagues to avoid the word “networking” entirely. Just call it “making friends who happen to have jobs.”
I used to think I needed to have a polished personal brand. I was completely wrong. I wasted six months trying to write “authoritative” articles on Medium that nobody read because they sounded like they were written by a corporate robot. People don’t want to connect with a brand; they want to connect with a person who has a weird hobby or a strong opinion about why the local transit system is failing.
One of my best professional connections came because I mentioned in a P.S. line that I was struggling to keep my sourdough starter alive. The guy I was emailing was a bread nerd. We spent forty minutes talking about hydration levels and five minutes talking about the contract I wanted to sign. We still talk every month.
Build the person, not the profile.
I’m still not sure if this works for everyone. Maybe if you’re in sales, you actually have to go to those mixers and shake hands until your skin peels off. But for the rest of us? The ones who just want to do good work and get paid fairly for it? The internet is a much better ballroom than any Marriott conference center could ever be.
Do you actually like going to those events, or are you just afraid of what happens if you stop showing up?