"Networking is time, dedication and, above all, strategy"

21/11/2019

Rosaura Alastruey (Advertising and Public Relations, UAB, ’96) first came across networking in 2004 on a trip to Silicon Valley, and since then she has devoted herself to it, as one of its pioneers in Spain. She has written two books: “El Networking” in 2007 and “Empleo 2.0” in 2009.

Innovative and dynamic, she gives training in networking ("properly done", in her words), and she works with companies seeking creative and effective ways to attract talent. 

You took Advertising and Public Relations at the UAB. What made you choose these studies?
I've always been passionate about two things in life: IT and advertising. I've got an elder brother who is an IT worker and when I was little I used to go around with keyboards instead of Barbies. I watched my brother programming but I'm too active for that so I chose Advertising.

What were your first steps in the profession?
I really enjoyed my degree but when I entered the "real world" it wasn't what I expected, unfortunately. I graduated in June '96, I got hold of a list of advertising agencies and I went from door to door around Barcelona. I joined an agency as a replacement for someone about to take maternity leave, but I didn't take to that side of the profession, though it's bound to have changed by now. So I decided to go over to the client's side. Up to 2007 I was working in the marketing department of a medical publisher's, dealing mostly with the online operations.

But in 2004 you change course.
Yes, I'd always been very sociable since I was very little. I was always the one who looked forward to my co-workers’ birthdays to organise something. In 2004 I got a chance to go to Silicon Valley on a very interesting business trip that was to change my life, because I found out that my liking for bringing people together had a name: networking. When I came back in July of that year, I combined my work in the medical publisher's with running my first courses in networking. On 1 January 2008 I decided to take the plunge and start setting up my own business. Nowadays you hear a lot about networking but when I was starting out nobody knew about it. 

What was networking like in 2007?
It was obviously more for businesspeople then. Now we've realised it's just as important for job seekers, as 80% of offers come through contacts. In fact, as I see it, networking is for everything, not just for finding a job or new clients: for finding a flat, finding someone to help with housekeeping.... Someone told me at a dinner ten years ago that the day would come when everybody could do networking, but I can still see plenty of work ahead of me, because networking is time, dedication and, above all, strategy. Meeting new people is great, but relationships have to be kept alive. We focus on networking when we need something, like a job or new clients, and when we get them we stop, but networks need to be worked on every day. If you haven't done any networking for thirty years you can't expect the network to appear out of nowhere. 

What is a good networking strategy?
There are different phases – first you have to focus. Decide, for example, which forty companies you would like to have as clients, or which ones you want to work for. You don't have to restrict yourself to those. Once you have your list you need to home in on the person you have to "seduce". And from then on, get in touch with them using the most efficient tool possible, needn't always be LinkedIn.

Are there other networks used by professionals?
Let me give you a curious example. A very large American company was holding a selection process, in which it had to select a lot of candidates from a specific locality. The hiring department would ordinarily have used LinkedIn, but surprisingly they used Tinder. Yes, I said Tinder. And why was that? They saw that the profile of the type of person they were looking for was very active on Tinder and, as well as that, Tinder allows geolocation, which on LinkedIn is only available for a few little functions on its mobile app. They started a campaign and when someone from the profile they were looking for logged in an advert came up: "We've got a job lined up for you." And it worked for them. It works because you can use irony and that attracts a certain type of person. Two start-ups have already done it in Spain.

A lot of people think LinkedIn is just a place to get your CV online.
Yes, perhaps LinkedIn has positioned itself strongly as a tool just for finding a job, when in fact it started out as a network of professional contacts. In the early days, and I've been on it since 2004, when it was hardly known or used here, there were no options for job hunting. I see LinkedIn as the Yellow Pages of the 21st century, I mean a platform for keeping up with international trends, a lifelong-learning tool. Don't get too obsessed with it though, it's not about having loads of contacts for their own sake. The first thing I say in class is: “Don't make contacts, make connections.” Having someone's card or contact details is not enough by itself: they need more work to turn them into a connection. LinkedIn is a really powerful tool that has helped to democratise networking, but I've seen two mistakes in Spain since I started and I can still see them now: people get started too late, when they have no clients or no job, and they do it without a strategy. Although we're more sociable in this country than in other cultures, we were taught to ask for nothing, to say nothing, not to draw attention to ourselves, and that baggage still holds us back a lot. 

In 2014 you get a phone call from Vueling. What did they want?
That was incredible. To organise their first networking event in one of their planes, thirty thousand feet up on a flight between Milan and Barcelona. The idea was that a hundred businesspersons, fifty Italians and fifty Spaniards, who didn't know each other, would get on a plane and use networking dynamics to set up ground-breaking projects to improve the experience of flying. And my job was to develop, create, think about and energise that activity.

So as well as teaching you offer your services to businesses. What do companies expect of you?
Providing ways to exploit LinkedIn to find candidates in the case of HR or commercial departments, suggesting innovative selection procedures, giving talks at annual conferences, helping to promote in-company networking, and so on. My job, on the one hand, is to be an intermediary between company and candidates and, on the other, to show the advantages of networking between the different departments of a company. The advantage I have is that I've gone through two phases: one very long one with candidates, and now I'm with the companies. And because my mind never stops I've thought up some interesting new services that I can't reveal just yet.

Tell us about one of the innovative activities you've set up for a company.
The other day we did a really interesting one: an elevator pitch with companies and master's degree students, but with a format very much like that of the programme "The Voice", because the students had to make their pitch to company representatives who had their backs turned, as in a blind audition. 

Everywhere in the world of relationships you've got the theory of the six degrees of separation. Do you believe in it?
Yes, it's the one that underpins the world of networking. It says that there are six intermediaries between any two people in the world. To get to any person in the world, even Obama himself, you're separated by six people. You know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone, and after at most six intermediaries you get to the person. And, in fact, what LinkedIn has done is to bring this number down to three.

What is the personal digital brand?
It's how you introduce yourself, all your characteristics, but in particular what marks you out from someone who does the same as you. Nowadays we've got digital tools to get our message across better. Google has become your extended CV. We always say you need to look yourself up on Google and make sure information that helps establish your personal brand is up there among the top results. And not just Linkedin – everybody has that. Personal branding is getting more and more important. In our time you started looking for work when you graduated. I always tell my students now that their job hunting starts while they're still at university or even before, because everything they publish on networks can be taken into account. 

Companies will check up on it when recruiting.
Yes, it’s the digital footprint they’ll look at before deciding whether a candidate is suitable. More and more, companies are prioritising attitudes over knowledge now, saying things like: “We're looking for people who really want to work”. One of the things the report "Talento Conectado" examines is how people look for work and how companies look for candidates, and it reveals that 81% of companies check up on candidates' social networks. I teach personal branding to Law students at a university and the very first thing I do in the first class is to "Google" them thoroughly, and not only with Google but also with other tools they are unaware of, because that's the first thing a company would do.

Have you got any upcoming challenges ahead?
Some years back we tried to set up the first networking cruise and that's still one of my challenges. Another one is to organise an event on the Barcelona cable car. My permanent challenge is to innovate. We've been born into a world of innovation. One of the great advantages of being an entrepreneur is that you can have a crazy idea and no-one will question it. You set your own limits.