Ready, Set, Connect! Networking and Interviewing with Intention

This is Part 5 in our series on the DARE method, EvolveMe’s framework for career reinvention. If you're just joining us, start with our intro piece, You Didn't Leave. You Were Pushed. Now What?, then move to the Discover phase in You're Not Starting Over. You're Starting From Here, the Amplify phase in Confidence Isn't a Personality Trait. It's a Practice and the Refresh phase, Same You. New Story. Refresh Your Resume, LinkedIn and Personal Brand. This article will be here when you’re ready.

At some point, the work you've done has to go out into the world!

Your strengths are clear, your resume and LinkedIn finally reflect who you are now and where you're headed.

But none of it matters until someone else sees it.

At some point, the work you've done has to go out into the world.

Embark, the fourth and final phase of EvolveMe's DARE method, is where everything you've built starts to move. It's about getting in front of the right people, having the right conversations, and walking into an interview ready to make your case.

Networking can feel awkward. Reaching out to someone you haven't spoken to in years. Putting yourself out there when you're not sure how you'll land. Interviewing for the first time in years and trusting that your skills are enough.

But it's also where things start to happen.

What we've seen, over and over, with the women who reach this stage: it almost always goes better than they expected. Of course there are rejections, slow responses, and conversations that go nowhere. But the women who go in prepared, and who aren't doing it alone, come out ahead.

Networking

You already know how to do this.

Women are natural connectors. We remember birthdays. We introduce people to each other without being asked. We check in on friends years after we've lost touch and pick the conversation back up as if no time has passed. 

That instinct is networking. You've had it your whole life. You just haven't pointed it at your career.

If you're telling yourself you don't have a network, stop right there. You do. It might not look like thousands of LinkedIn contacts, but it's there: former colleagues, people from your last few jobs, college friends you haven't talked to in years, parents from your kids' school, people from your volunteer board, your gym, your place of worship. It's just been dormant while you weren't using it.

At any career stage, authentic networking is all about having honest conversations with people you respect, asking smart questions, being genuinely curious about what they're doing, and giving them an accurate picture of what you're looking for so they can help you. 

Cold-applying to job postings almost never works this well.

What trips most people up is assuming the opportunity will come from their closest circle, the five or six people they talk to every week. It rarely does. You likely already know who they know.

The real value sits two or three connections out: the colleague of a colleague, the person your old boss happens to mention you to, the friend of a friend who heard you were looking. Those connections carry information and access that your closest circle doesn't.

80% of new opportunities come through personal and professional connections. Most opportunities come from someone knowing someone, often someone you haven't talked to in years. Your job in the Embark phase is to make sure the right people, near and far, know what you're looking for.

Say yes more than feels comfortable. Take the coffee meeting even when you're not sure where it leads. Go to the event that feels like a stretch. It all adds up. You never know which conversation opens the door.

When you meet with someone, ask if there's someone else they can introduce you to. Then return the favor. Send them something afterward. An article. A podcast. Something that says you were listening.

The more often you put yourself out there in small, low-pressure ways, the more natural it gets to talk about yourself. That ease is the muscle you'll need when the stakes are higher and you're sitting across from someone deciding whether to hire you.

Interviewing

Interviewing uses that same muscle, under more pressure.

If you're interviewing after a career gap or pivot, it feels different from interviewing when you're actively employed. There's more to explain. The stakes feel higher. And if it's been a few years, the format may have changed more than you expect.

But an interview is really just a conversation with higher stakes, the same kind you've been having your whole career, whether you've understood it that way or not. You've already talked your way through hard conversations, made a case for something you believed in, or built trust with a stranger in the space of an hour. 

Interviewing asks you to do that on purpose, for yourself.

It helps to practice with someone who'll give you honest feedback. Not your spouse, who loves you. Not your friend, who doesn't want to make you feel bad. Someone objective, who tells you when you're rambling, when you're underselling, when your answer to "tell me about yourself" wanders somewhere that isn't helping you. 

Who's that person for you? Maybe a former colleague. Maybe someone from a professional network you belong to.

Treat the interview less like an interrogation and more like a conversation with a future colleague, someone you're getting to know. That shift takes a lot of the fear and a lot of the power imbalance out of the room. You're assessing too: whether the work, the culture, and the people are actually right for you.

That's easier to see clearly if you come prepared. Research the company beyond the website, read what they've actually been posting on LinkedIn lately, and look up the people you're meeting with, so you walk in knowing who you're talking to and where the company stands right now, not where it stood when you applied three weeks ago.

Come with your own questions, too. A few that tend to surface insights:

• What did the person who had this role before me do well, and where did they struggle?

• What would success look like in the first six months?

• What's the one thing people don't realize about working here until they've been here a while?
  

The answers tell you more about the job than the job description ever will. The women who walk in well prepared make better decisions and a stronger impression.

And if it doesn't work out, the interview isn’t time wasted. You've made a connection with someone who now knows what you're capable of and what you're looking for, so follow up with a thank you. You never know where the connection may lead. Other opportunities at that company or colleagues in the same industry who need the value you bring.

This often takes longer than you expect, and that's normal.

A search, especially after a gap or a pivot, rarely moves in a straight line. It's not two weeks of effort and an offer. It’s often three months. Six months. Sometimes longer, especially at senior levels, where there are fewer roles and more competition for each.

That timeline isn't a sign that something's wrong. It's the nature of this work.

The hard part usually isn't the big rejection. It's the quiet stretch in between: the application that goes nowhere, the recruiter who never calls back, the interview that felt great and then nothing. Those silences will test you more than any single no.

Remember to protect the things that have nothing to do with the search: your sleep, your people, the parts of your week that remind you you're more than a job title in transition. Measure your effort, not just your outcomes. Some weeks, you'll do everything right and still get no movement. That's the search. It's not a verdict on your capabilities.

The women who get through this phase well aren't the ones who never doubt themselves. They're the ones who keep showing up anyway, week after week, including the weeks when nothing seems to be working.

You don't have to do this alone.

Career transition is isolating by nature. You're often doing it quietly, without a lot of people knowing the full picture. The days when you don't hear back, or the conversation you thought went well leads nowhere, or you find yourself on a Tuesday afternoon wondering what you're doing, those days are harder alone.

So find a few people to go through this with. Join events, in person or virtual, and take someone with you. Find someone you can run interview practice with, someone who'll tell you the truth. Talk to women who've made it to the other side; they remember exactly what this stage feels like, and most of them are glad to talk about it. 

Women who are a few steps ahead can tell you what they wish they'd known. And women who are moving right alongside you will show up for the hard days.

A word about timing

Don’t rush to get to the Embark phase. Going out into the market before you've thoroughly done the Discover, Amplify, and Refresh work tends to produce a lot of activity and not a lot of traction.

You have networking conversations, but you aren’t clear what help or information you’re looking for. You get an interview, but you're not sure what to say. You may even land a position, but it's not quite right, and six months later, you're back where you started.

The women who move through a career transition with the most clarity and momentum do the upfront work to understand who they are and what they’re looking for in advance of networking and interviewing - the work of the Embark phase. 

If you're ready for your next move, we'd love to help you. EvolveMe's 1:1 and group coaching programs follow the full DARE method, start to finish. Learn more at evolveme.work.