"Open to Anything" = Hired for Nothing: Accelerate Your Career Search with Smarter Networking

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Networking can be the best way to land your first (or next) big job, but are you going about it the wrong way?

Too often, networking conversations end the same way: the other person says, “I’ll keep an eye out and let you know if I hear of anything that fits.”

You nod, thank them… and never hear from them again.

So what went wrong—and more importantly, what can you do better?

In this episode of The TechEd Podcast, Matt Kirchner breaks down why most job seekers leave networking meetings empty-handed—and how to change that. The difference? It’s not about who you know. It’s about how you approach the conversation in the first place.

Matt shares the exact mindset, questions, and preparation that turn a vague “I’m open to anything” into a powerful, productive dialogue that gets results. From clarifying your goals to building a smart list of target companies, this episode is packed with actionable strategies that help job seekers stand out and move forward.

Whether you’re entering the workforce or making a career pivot, these insights will help you land the right opportunity—and if you’re someone who supports job seekers, it’s just as valuable for you.

Listen to learn:

• Why being “open to anything” can actually limit your opportunities
• The 3 questions to answer before every networking meeting
• How to create a list of target companies—and why it works like magic
• A smarter way to ask for help that gets real follow-up
• Encouragement for staying persistent through rejection and uncertainty

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Transcript

Matt Kirchner: 0:08

It's Matt Kirkner, and this is The TechEd Podcast. You know, we are getting questions rolling in for our new segment called Ask us anything. We've been plugging this on the podcast for several weeks. The whole idea is, we get so many great questions from the world of technical education, STEM education, and we want to create regular episodes just answering your questions. And so keep those questions rolling in. We've got some great ones so far. The Ask Us Anything episodes will be our producer, Melissa Martin, asking the questions, and yours truly, Matt Kirkner, answering them. We may even take a shot at answering some of them together, but keep the questions coming. Put them at TechEd podcast.com/ask us anything. Just go to that URL. TechEd podcast.com/ask us anything, one word and submit your question. Welcome into this week's episode of The TechEd Podcast. My name is Matt Kirkner. I am your host, and we're going to talk about, I think, a challenge that's facing a lot of young people, especially people entering the career world, people who are leaving high school, leaving Technical College, leaving whatever came after high school, whether it's direct to workforce or it's going on to a university and then graduating with a four year degree, maybe it's a graduate degree, what have you, lots of folks in the job market right now, and the job market is not what it was. It is not what it was just a few short years ago. And I think we all remember the time 2022 early 2023 and so on. If you had any kind of a STEM degree. If you had really any kind of experience at all in a data or STEM related field, then in a lot of cases, if you had no experience, it was such a hot job market that you could literally just go on to indeed, you could send a resume somewhere. You could apply for a job, jobs for just waiting, careers for just waiting, for people. The world has changed. And for any of you that are in the job market right now, what you're finding is that it's still, by the way, a seller's market. It's still a great market to great time to be in the job market, but it is not like it was two or three years ago. And so we still have more jobs than we have people to fill them, but it's not the low hanging fruit we saw in 2021 22 and 23 and because of that, what I'm getting a lot more of, and I get these all the time anyway, but what I'm getting a lot more of are people coming to me. I know they're going to others as well and asking for help in their career search. And a lot of times, these are friends of my kids. So my kids are now in their 20s, and their friends are, in some cases, looking for jobs. In a lot of cases, it's kids of my friends, so I've got a friend or a contact or a professional relationship, and that individual's child is looking for a job, and so they reach out and they say, Hey, can we network? Can we have a meeting? Can you give me some advice on my job search? I will tell you this. And this is the first message for anybody who's in that mode, whether it's you, whether it's somebody that you're close to, the first message that I would have is make that phone call, ask that question, send that text, send that email. People are really, really eager to help you, and I almost, I won't even say almost. I never say no to somebody who reaches out and says, Hey, can you give me a little bit of help in my job search? I might not be able to give them hours and hours and hours of my time, but I'm always willing to give them a little attention and help them along the way. So lesson number one is, don't be afraid to reach out and make that call, make that request. But I'm also going to tell you that how you do that and how prepared you are when that meeting comes around with whoever it is that you're trying to network with can make all the difference in whether or not that networking meeting is successful and leads to a potential career opportunity, or whether you just get bounced along and told what you want to hear, but don't really get the help that you need. And so we're going to talk on this episode of the podcast just where I think people are getting it right in terms of networking for that next job, and where I think they need a little bit of help, and maybe they're not getting it quite right. And I can tell you that the vast majority of people that I meet with on this topic haven't quite figured it out yet. They're not quite to the point where they've got the model dialed in, where they're super effective at asking the right questions and asking for the right kind of help. That's what we're going to talk about on this episode of The TechEd Podcast. I will tell you I have totally changed my approach, by the way, with people that come to me and ask for help with their career search, and I'll tell you how it used to go. Used to go like this. I would get an email, maybe it's from a friend, a business contact the candidate themselves, and they would say, hey, so and so is in a career transition. Can you meet with them? Can you give them some help? So the meeting would come around, we'd get it scheduled, and we'd sit down have a little bit of chit chat and small talk. Where are you from? Where'd you go to school? Where are you living now? And then we would get down to business, and I would say something like, so tell me what you're up to. Tell me what you're looking for. And I would get some kind of a generic, kind of vanilla answer that would be like, I want to find a challenge where I can put my skills. To work in whatever fill in the blank workspace they wanted to be in, whatever market that they want to be in to work for a great organization. So they'd say, I just want a new challenge where I can put my skills in accounting or in industrial engineering to work for a great organization. Okay, fine, good enough. So you gave me a really generic answer to the question, and then my second question would be something like, Have you put any thought into what kind of an organization that you want to work for? What would a good job or a good career be for you? Where do you want to work? And their answer would be, well, really, I'm just looking for any opportunity. I don't need to be really specific. I'm open to anything. So let's think about for a moment what this person was trying to do, right? So they're answering, they're giving me really generic, really plain answers to the question, what do you want to do? Where do you want to work? Why are they doing that? And think about that for just a moment, and I think a lot of us will get to the same conclusion, and that conclusion is that they're really saying, I don't want to count myself out of an opportunity, or if I'm too specific about what I'm looking for, and this person doesn't have an opportunity or isn't aware of a role in that space, I might be costing myself an opportunity. So I'll give you an example. Maybe I know of a manufacturing company that's looking for, you know, an entry level supervisor position, and the person that's sitting across the table from me says, Well, I'm really looking for a job in production planning in manufacturing. Just to use that as an example. Well, they're worried that if they say production planning, and I know of a job that's, you know, an entry level supervisor position that's open, that I'm not going to put that opportunity in front of them, because it isn't what they're looking for. I get that right. I mean, we don't want to be too specific when we're looking for a role. We want to be open to any opportunity. But let me, let me explain and maybe provide an example of the challenge that we put in front of somebody that's trying to help us network for our next role. When we give them really generic answers to their questions, I want everybody in the audience. This will be a little bit of an interactive moment here on The TechEd Podcast. I want you to answer a question. I'm thinking of a certain individual, and I want you to tell me who that person is. And what I will tell you is this individual, they work in either the technical or the technology space or the finance space, and they're running a fortune 500 company. Who is it? Think for a moment and tell me who that is. And already you're realizing that the ads of you getting that right are really, really slim, right? I mean, there are tons of people, CEOs of technology or finance companies in the Fortune 500 the ads that you would guess the person that I was thinking of pretty slim. Let me ask you a few more questions. All right, now I'm thinking about, I'll be more specific, I'm thinking about the founder and the chairman of a tech company. And it's a tech company that you're probably familiar with, and there's a really good chance that maybe in the last week or so you've engaged with this company. You can go on your phone, there's an app, and you can shop for just about anything, and you can order it, and it will show up on your front doorstep the next couple of days, or maybe a week later. What company is that? And not just what company? Who's the person who is that founder or Chairman that I'm thinking of? And just about everybody knows that, of course, the company is Amazon, and the person is the founder and chairman, Jeff Bezos, right? So now you had a really specific question, really specific answer. Let me give you another one. This person leads a company in the aerospace market. In the space market, they also lead a major social media platform that everybody has heard of, and they also founded and lead an electric vehicle company, right? Super, super easy question. Everybody is thinking of Elon Musk and, of course, the company SpaceX and x and Tesla that he leads. Really easy question to answer. I'll give you one more. I'm thinking of a person who recently announced their retirement. They're deep, deep, deep into their career, one of the wealthiest people on the planet. They live in Omaha, Nebraska. They've had a frugal lifestyle their entire life, and they lead a huge investment company, at least until the end of the year, when they're retiring. Okay, almost all of us know that that person is Warren Buffett, super easy, relatively easy, if you're paying any attention to finance, to technology, to the news, to people in the news, those are all pretty easy questions to answer, right? Who doesn't know Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, or, for that matter, Warren Buffet? Well, here's the reason I bring up this example. When you ask specific questions like that, immediately your brain goes to somebody. You've got something to lock onto. You're starting to prime your brain to think about possibilities. Even when I say founder and chairman of a tech company, you're starting to narrow in on what I'm thinking about. That is the way the human brain works. The more information we give it, the more specific of an answer we can provide. That's not any advanced neuroscience. It's pretty much common sense. Well, let's go back to that first question I asked when I said, Hey, I'm thinking about. A person who leads a fortune 500 either tech or finance company, that is the kind of challenge you are giving to somebody who's helping you through your career transition. When you say, I'll do anything for any company, really, I'm open to any opportunity. Because the truth of the matter is, there's almost no way to answer that question. Your brain doesn't lock onto anything. You don't think about any individual company or any individual market space or so on, in terms of where this individual that you're networking with, or in my particular case, I'm sitting across the table from a candidate. There's no ability for me to be able to say, here are some folks that I could connect you with. All right, so you're trying to be amiable, you're trying to be open. You don't want to box yourself out of a position. The irony here, folks is that in doing that and giving that really generic answer to the question, you're boxing yourself out of opportunities because the person on the other side of the table, this person that you have gone to because you want their help in finding a job, has no idea where to send you, who to refer you to, what direction that you could go. It's really, really hard to solve that problem for somebody. Let's think for a moment though about a better way of doing this right, rather than just going on this vague depiction of where you want to go with your career and me as someone who's trying to help you grasping at thin air. Here's what I do now. And every time I get one of these meetings, I invite the candidate, or I invite the individual who's reaching out to me and saying, hey, I want to meet with you to network for my next job opportunity. I actually send them a magazine column that I authored at the end of 2024 I think it was published in December of 2020 December of 2024 I think, as the audience knows, every single month I write content for Gardner Business Media, it's published in several of their trade magazines. And so I just wrote a column on this in December of last year, and we'll link that up in the show notes, by the way. So if you want to check that magazine column out, we'll link that up in the show notes. You can read all about what you're hearing today on The TechEd Podcast. So now let's talk about a better way. Let's take this new approach. Rather than politely closing the meeting and wishing these people luck in terms of where they should go or where they could go with their career opportunities, I invite them now, in advance of that meeting to be super, super specific, the more specific they can again, the irony of being polite is that in saying that you're open to any opportunity, hoping not to cost yourself an opportunity, is that you make it impossible, or almost impossible, for me to be able to help you. And to think about this another way. Who am I more in a position to be able to assist. Is it someone who says they want to put their skills to work for a great organization, or someone that says, I've always worked dreamed of working for a world class manufacturer, or I've always dreamt of been being in the world of private equity, or I want to work for an investment bank, or I want to work for a media company, or I'd love to take my career to an events management company or to a sports franchise. I mean, whatever it is that you're dreaming of, doing whatever job you are seeking, whatever you think your skills are specifically and uniquely appropriate for. That is the role that is the job that you should be asking somebody to help you find so the first lesson here is, let's be as specific as possible. If they say, Hey, I'm looking for a job in manufacturing, my mind will immediately go to manufacturing companies that I work with, whether it's in I live in Wisconsin, I can tell you I have contacts at every major Wisconsin manufacturing company, and in most cases I know, you know, the CEO of that company of all the largest manufacturing companies in the state of Wisconsin, so I'm in a much better position in that case, to help this individual, if they're asking for specific referrals to specific companies or a specific marketplace that they think that they want to be in. If they say, I want to be in private equity or I want to be in finance, guess what? I have tons of friends serve on boards of organizations that are in that space. I can send them in the direction that they want to go. So the first thing is, think really hard about what market you want to be in. Do you want to be in manufacturing? Do you want to be in finance? Do you want to be in nonprofits? I mean, whatever that is, be specific about where you want to go with your career. The next thing I ask people to do is be really specific about the kind of position that you would see yourself in, if it's a business development role in a manufacturing operation. Well, then say that if you want to work in data science or data analytics in industrial company, say that if you want to work as an analyst in finance or a private equity organization, then say that the more specific you can be, the more my brain is going to start thinking about the answer to the Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk or Warren Buffett question. I'm getting really, really specific. Now I know where to send this person. Now I know how to help them. So the final question that I asked them, and this was actually a lesson that I learned from a great friend of mine, when he was doing a job search. This goes back about 10 years, and he was so specific as to research and make a list of the exact, precise companies that he would like to work for, or that he would like to work in. So he literally had a list of precise businesses. There were like 25 of them. He had done his research. He knew the culture of the company, he knew the products of the company, he knew the operations of the company. So he knew everything about these businesses. And he had a list of 25 and when he would sit down in a networking meeting, he would put that list in front of the individual with whom he was meeting, and he would say, Do you know anybody at these companies? And he said, it was absolutely magic how, when he started doing that, his networking meeting, went from people racking their brains to think of anybody, to people going through the list of 25 companies and say, You know what, in 20 of these 25 companies, I really don't know anybody. I can't help you, but in these five, in these five companies that you have identified, I have contacts in every single one of those businesses, and I would be happy to refer you to that individual or to somebody that I know within that company. So really, really specific. So think about what we've done. We're answering three questions before we even go into our networking meeting, we're asking answering a question about what market space do we want to be in? We're asking a question about what is our dream job and where, what would we really see ourselves excelling in? And we're saying, This is a list of 25 companies, and maybe the list is 20, maybe it's 40, but these are the kinds of companies that I would want to work for or or work with. And I will also tell you that those companies will take a look at whoever you're meeting with, will take a look at your list of companies. And even if they don't know somebody in an exact company, they may say, Hey, I don't know somebody at Siemens, but I know somebody at Rockwell Automation, that's a really similar company. Would you be interested in a referral to that company. So those are the three questions that we want to answer when we are going into our job, search, networking, meetings, what market do I want to work in? What kind of a job would I like to have? What are some specific companies? I would also tell you that geographically, it's helpful to have some have some idea of where it is that you want to live and work when you're done, are you specific to a specific geographical area? Maybe you've got some family reasons or some other reasons why it's unreasonable, or you're not able to move to another geographic location. You might as well send that right. Say that if you're somebody that, for whatever reason, is going to continue your career in Southern California, for example, it doesn't do you any good to get to our referral to a company in New York. You're not going and working there anyway, so you might as well be specific if there are some constraints geographically around where you're where you want to go work. Now, you could deliver all of this in a way that doesn't sound like you're being too specific or you're being too difficult, or you're being too picky. It's okay to say, I'm open to a lot of opportunities, but these are the ones that I'm thinking about. You could even ask the person that you're networking with for a little bit of feedback on how they would see you fitting in that market space, in that position, in that particular company. Now I'll also give one more piece of advice on this whole topic, and that is, it's okay to have multiple answers to the same question. In other words, you know, if you're going to meet with a let's say that you're somebody who's interested in either working in finance and or working in manufacturing, and you haven't quite dialed that in yet. Well, it's okay to have a list of companies and kind of a little bit of a description for yourself that's specific to the finance people, and then another one that's specific to the manufacturing people. And then, as you're meeting with someone who is more likely to have referrals or to have a network in manufacturing, then use the manufacturing list. If you're more likely in a meeting to be talking to somebody who has more contacts in finance or or what have you, or in nonprofit or retail or hospitality or defense or energy, or whatever that market space is. It's okay to have a couple of these lists, but be specific, that is where people are most likely to be able to help you. I'm also going to tell you that this podcast episode is one that I am now going to send and will be required listening for anybody that reaches out to me and wants to network about what their next career opportunity is, take a listen to this podcast and understand what it is that I'm looking for and why it's important to be specific. I would also encourage anybody who maybe isn't a job seeker, but is somebody who is getting the same kind of referral and networking calls that I am to use the same approach. And what I've found over the course of the last year is inviting candidates to be way more specific in advance of our meeting. They come to the meetings way more prepared, and I'm in a much, much better position to help them. I can tell you, as we close out this episode of the podcast, there's almost nothing more rewarding to me than when I have an opportunity to sit down and spend time with a person who's 10. Taking that next step in their career, and I make some referrals for them, or I connect them to some people, and one of those referrals or connections leads to a career opportunity. And I can tell you it happens time and time and time again, way more times than I could count, and it's certainly not every time. And my hit rate is nowhere near 100% but I will tell you that so many times over the course of the last, let's call it 10 or 15 years, I've seen people land really, really cool career opportunities. And my success rate, by the way, in referring them to the right opportunity for them. And as a result of that, being more successful in them landing the kind of career that they're looking for, my hit rate has gone way up as well in terms of being helpful to these individuals. So the truth is that people who are maybe a little bit deeper in their career, I certainly would count myself on that list, people who have really broad networks. And there are people with broader networks than the one that I've got, but mine is by no means narrow. They are super, super excited to help you, to be helpful, to point you in the right direction, but we need to be specific. So that was a message that I thought was so important for people that are trying to take that next step in their career that we dedicated IT, an entire episode of the podcast to this specific topic. If you want to read about it, as we mentioned earlier, check out the show notes. We'll link up the specific article, the column that I mentioned for Gardner Business Media not too long ago. And with that, first of all, if you're somebody in my position who is interested and being helpful with a job seeker and pointing them in the right direction and giving them some ideas, thank you so much for that work. It's really, really important work and and when you do get that call, when you do get that email, please respond to it, invite the person in. It only takes a half an hour. You're going to make a huge make a huge difference in a person's life. And who among us didn't rise to whatever level of success that we've achieved without a tremendous amount of help from people that were willing to take some time for us earlier in our careers. So with that, for our job seekers, and this is the message I leave with all of the job seekers, all the people that reach out to me, looking to network for new positions. You are on a journey. Every single thing that happens to you happens for a reason, and that reason benefits you. You are going to get rejection. You are going to have people that don't call you back. You are going to have people who you think you're the perfect person for a job, and they end up offering it to somebody else, you're gonna have disappointment. You're gonna have heartbreak. That is what life is all about. But the truth of the matter is, stay after it, because I can tell you, every single one of us have dealt with a little bit of those types of obstacles in one job search or another, and I can tell you unequivocally that every time I had a setback when I was looking to take a new step in my career. I can look back on that and say it absolutely happened for a reason, and I ended up in a better spot. So stay after it. Keep reaching out, keep looking for the perfect opportunity. For you, it is out there, and I want you to remember that as you continue your job search. I want you to remember to tune into The TechEd Podcast every single week. We'll be back next week, of course, with another incredible guest, and really, really excited for next week's episode. In the meantime, check out the show notes. We have the best show notes in the business. You will find those at TechEd podcast.com/and listen to this. It's accelerate, right? Like accelerating your career search. So it's TechEd podcast.com/accelerate, A, C, C, E, L, E, R, A, T, E, when you're done there, of course, head on over to social media. You'll find us all over social media, whether you are on Instagram, whether you're on Facebook, whether you are on Tick, tock, LinkedIn, doesn't matter. You will find us all over social media and one parting comment, don't forget to submit those questions. To ask us anything that is at TechEd podcast.com/ask, us anything looking forward to the first episode of that Melissa and I both are and that will be coming out here in the next quarter, probably a little bit sooner, until next week. I'm Matt Kirkner, happy job searching and happy supporting all those folks that are looking to take that next step in their career. I will see you next week. You.