The strength of your network can be an indicator of how far you'll go in your career, your happiness, and even how long you'll live. Building a strong network means building supportive relationships with the people in your life, and HuntHelper focuses on your career relationships. To be clear, HuntHelper can't improve your relationships - that's all on you. What we can do is keep you organized, give you some starting points to open and continue communication, and remind you to keep in touch with and help out people who might soon be able to help you.
Your HuntHelper Network
HuntHelper will store the email addresses of people in your network that you want to keep in contact with. Using one of the special networking email addresses, you can add to your network either when you email someone, or by sending a list of email addresses to HuntHelper. For each person you add to your network, HuntHelper will set up a reminder to reach out to them in the future.
HuntHelper network categories
HuntHelper allows you to categorize your contacts by their role within your network. For example, a teammate will be someone highly engaged and interested in your success. An advisor or mentor will be someone you turn to when you need advice. An expert is someone you can contact when you need expertise in a specific area. Different network categories may have different reminder intervals and suggested activities.
Refer to the networking section of the Supported Emails guide for a complete list of networking categories.
Adding people to your network
HuntHelper isn't intended to be a replacement for your address book, or a social network. HuntHelper networking works best when you carefully curate the people you add to your network. Your HuntHelper network should have a handful of close friends and associates (your inner circle) and a larger group of people on the periphery of your network. Your inner circle will keep you happy and healthy, while your outer circle will generate opportunities for you - if you cultivate it properly.
To add someone to your network, first decide what category that person should fall under. Then, use one of the following two methods to add that person to your network:
- Send a normal email to the person and adding the contact category email address (refer to the Supported Emails guide) to the cc or bcc field of the email.
- Send an email directly to the contact category email address (refer to the Supported Emails guide), and put your contact's email address in the body of the email. Using this method, you can add multiple emails to the category at once, using a comma separated list of email addresses.
Create a diverse network
HuntHelper supports a number of different contact types, and a healthy network should have a diverse group of contacts in different categories. Each contact category adds a different benefit to your network. There's no hard limit on the number of people you can have in your network, however as you add more people, the work required to keep your relationships strong may increase.
Cultivating your network
Building your network can require a little bit of work. If you have natural networking skills, you'll have no trouble here. But if, like me, networking doesn't come naturally, it's good to keep 3 keys in mind:
- Give to get - giving something of value to people in your network - information, connections, tasty treats - raises the chances that someone will think of your name when an opportunity comes their way.
- In person is better - meeting in person builds stronger relationships than just communicating by email. Try to meet over coffee or lunch, or even just talking with someone in the hallway between meetings.
- Ask for what you want - if you're adding someone to your HuntHelper network, there's a good reason, and it doesn't need to be a secret from them. Make sure they know what you want (and find out what they want) so that if an opportunity comes up, they know you're someone who's interested.
Removing people from your network
As your career progresses, you may move jobs, move cities, or start to move in different social circles. At some point, you may need to remove someone from your network to make room for someone new. There's currently no way to remove someone from your network using just email, so you'll need to login to the website to remove a network contact. Go to My Network in the menu, and you can remove a contact with the button.