Connect 📨 Day 3 - Networking Advent Calendar
Here we go, the most notorious part of networking - LinkedIn connection requests
The Networking Advent Calendar is a 24-day long training program to build your networking muscles (and your network)! Not sure why you should do this or missed Day 1, read here; to read Day 4, go here.
Day 3: Send 3 connection requests on LinkedIn
This is a topic that I have very strong opinions (complaints) about. Why does LinkedIn get a bad rep? Partly because 90% of the connection requests I get give me 0 reason why I should connect with them. It felt like people were just clicking on the connect button without even reading my profile. And the small handful of people who do write a note literally make it look like they just copy-pasted a text. If you want to see some specific ( and bad) examples, I screenshot some of the worst notes I received.
Platforms like LinkedIn make it easy to click on buttons to send out connection requests en masse, but networking is, at the end of the day, still a form of socializing: you are interacting with an actual human being who will react to what you say. People forget that they still need to be friendly and polite. Personalizing the message also lets the reader know that you are not a bot. - Networking your way to a job
On Day 3, I challenge you to send 3 genuine, friendly, and personal connection requests on LinkedIn. Since you wrote down the types of people you’d like to network with yesterday, this is a good opportunity to reach out to them.
“I still don’t know how to write this message”
Well, the good news is there’s a 300-character limit, so you don’t need to write a perfect essay. Just stick to these 2 rules:
Be personal
Make it relevant for them
The more specific you can make the message, the better. Here’s a template:
Hi Maria,
Just attended your event yesterday and love that you advocate for women in engineering leadership! I’m transitioning into software engineering and found your advice helpful for working with my managers. Would love to connect and learn more from you!
Best,
Annie
Here’s an example of a message I just sent today:
Hi X,
I learned about [X’s company] through Person A, loved the product, introduced it to my team, now everyone’s using it! I also realized we’re both in [Networking Group], small world :) Would love to connect & learn from [X’s company]’s journey so I can launch my own startup one day.
Best,
Annie
Good luck and go get them tiger!
Are you excited to see how you can exercise your networking muscle? Any feedback for me? Looking forward to hearing from you!