A physics education may teach us to be “investigators” in the research science sense of the word, but the detective skills tend to get omitted. When it comes to networking, career building, and job hunting in physics, or any career path, a bit of the gumshoe trade craft can come in handy. Here are a few common problems that a touch of private eye thinking can help solve:
Forgotten Names: I used to be awful at remembering names. Now, after years of practice and concentrated effort, I’m merely bad at it. Meeting an interesting potential contact and then forgetting their name is no fun. Unfortunately, it is all to easy to do, especially at big events when you are confronted with lots of new faces and names. If you run into this problem too, then a few simple strategies can help. First, it is always smart to prevent the issue from coming up at all by collecting “evidence”:
- Ask for business cards when you meet new people until it is a reflex. This will work better in some contexts than others. Physicists, as a rule, are pretty bad about having or carrying cards. In most other professions it is de rigueur.
- Take advantage of conference name tags and use your phone to snap pictures of your new acquaintance’s badge (if they do not have a card).
- If they are on LinkedIn, then you can also look them up on the phone app and connect immediately.
- Take the classic approach and mentally repeat the new person’s name in your head and then write it down with as many particulars as you can immediately after the conversation ends.
Assuming you did not do any of the preceding and forgot the name (or part of the name), there are plenty of tricks left to help recover the information. Even though you may have forgotten a person’s name, you undoubtedly remember some details like where and what they work on, who you know in common, etc. Make these bits of information keywords (the more the better) and start searching databases. Here are some to try:
- Google and other big search engines. Frequently this will be your first and last stop. I once tracked down a name I forgot by searching for, and finding, a list of prior occupants of a government office.
- LinkedIn and other social networks, which is especially useful in tracking down people via mutual connections.
- Professional organization directories like those for the APS and IEEE.
- Alumni directories when you share an alma mater.
- Academic journal when you remember the specifics of their work.
No Email Address: What if you succeeded in getting and remembering a person’s name, but, for whatever reason, missed getting contact details? Most people are, for good reason, very careful to keep their email address off of the open internet, so a simple Google search might not be very helpful, but the other directories listed above may be. If none of those work, and you can not find a mutual acquaintance with the information, then there is a trick that sometimes works. Find their company’s domain name and try some common default formulas for email addresses. For example, it is common for company email addresses to have the standard form of first initial + last name @ company domain (e.g. John Smith at Acme Corp would be jsmith@acme.com). The message will likely bounce if you guess wrong, so you will have feedback. Just be careful with really common names (like John Smith) which there may be multiples of at the same company. In that case, you need to see if you can determine the pattern the company uses for duplicates (e.g. jsmith100@acme.com vs. jsmith101@acme.com). This trick has worked for me a few times.
No One On the Inside: Gathering inside information about open positions, general job prospects, etc. from someone inside the company or organization you are interested in is incredibly valuable. This is classic detective territory and there is a clearly an art to asking the right questions in the right way that can only be developed through practice. My previous tip on networking and informational interviews apply to both lead generation and conversation strategies. The critical thing to remember when investigating job and business prospects is that you need to talk to people, either on the phone or in person. Email does not really get the job done because the bandwidth is too low and it is much harder to notice and follow up on things people leave unsaid or merely allude to, which tends to be where the important information is. Also, never end a conversation without asking who you should talk to next.
No Reasonable Box to Check on the LinkedIn Connection Screen: I have found that LinkedIn’s connection request functionality is context sensitive and, frankly, a bit mysterious. I am still unclear on all the rules the web application uses when you request connections to new people. Sometimes, you click the “Connect” button and an invitation gets sent automatically. Often, you will get the “How do you know Jane Doe?” screen that forces you to pick a company or school you know Jane from. If you already have Jane’s email, say from her business card, then the smart move here is to click “Other” and fill in her email at the prompt. Claiming to be her “friend” if you are not is probably a bad move. This could mean you are stuck if you failed to get Jane’s email for some reason. Fortunately, there is a work around to solve this situation. For some reason, the LinkedIn mobile app (at least on iPhone) will immediately send connection invitations to the exact same people the full web application will demand further information for. I have used this trick successfully many times and it should work for you too.