Finding work through word of mouth: a real case

Editor’s note: This article was first published in August 2012, at the height of the economic crisis in Spain. Its figure of almost six million unemployed refers to that moment.

People who work in hospitality know it better than anyone. Experts on job-hunting techniques recommend it in their talks. Many have tried it and got good results. We’re talking about looking for work through our network of contacts.

It’s a chain effect. I know five people, those five friends know another five each, who in turn know another five friends. Our request for work, made to five friends, has reached 125 people, and some of them know of a job opening, as happened with my nephew.

A real case

I have a 19-year-old nephew whose academic record is fairly disappointing. In the end I felt obliged to help him look for work. A temp agency turned him down for lack of experience and training. He’s very hard to place because he’s “a blank page” with nothing on it.

I turned to an old friend who works for a hotel chain as a hotel manager. She set a few conditions and made things clear, which boiled down to: “If he isn’t responsible at work, he won’t get more than one chance.”

Things were laid out plainly, to avoid deception and misunderstandings. That was last May. Now, in mid-August, he doesn’t have a permanent contract, but he can say that, with almost six million people unemployed, he has been working all summer.

How did he do it?

That first opportunity at the hotel let him meet people in the hospitality business, who get asked by other hotel and restaurant owners for support staff. They in turn know other owners who need this kind of worker, and the occasional needs of one and another have kept him in work all these months, and in a period of extreme crisis, when demand for these services was lower than expected.

The key to success

Without a doubt, word of mouth among the managers of hotels, restaurants, rural guesthouses and the like, who passed the employee’s phone number from one to another and called on his services.

None of this happens unless my nephew shows a set of qualities that those people liked enough to recommend him. These are the qualities behind his success:

Responsibility: in punctuality, in efficiency, in the daily demands of his work. He built trust and made the hours he was paid for worth it through the work he did. He didn’t just do the bare minimum; the results he delivered meant the benefit he brought to the company that hired him was greater than what it spent on his wages.

Teamwork: he supported his colleagues effectively. He was at the bottom of the ladder, had to back everyone else up and do the worst jobs. Yet his colleagues succeeded at their work thanks to his help and support. If he had failed, so would the rest, and the team and the particular business where he worked would have seen customer satisfaction drop. He was the foundation of the building: if he fell, everything else collapsed.

Adapting to the job: every day a different organization, with different bosses and different colleagues. He had to fit in and become someone approachable and supported. He managed to earn trust in each business, and they paid him back with new opportunities.

Featured image: Ricardo Martín, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.