HOW MANY Taps to Get to Know You?
Preparing for Meetings, Interviews and Events With Less Time, Less Work and a Lot Less Tapping by Bhavin Shah
Thanks to a universe of content online, doing the research for a meeting, a networking meet-up or a job interview yields more information than you could ever hope to digest before the event. It’s now possible for an interviewee to know just as much about her hiring managers as they know about her. Now you can show up at a networking function knowing the entire professional background of the presenters. If you’re in sales or business development, you hope that gathering more intelligence about your client than your competitor can to give yourself the upper hand.
But preparing for a meeting or event using a mobile device on the go is decidedly…lacking. Looking up a name in a contact app or a business networking app requires lots of typing. If you have the proverbial “fat fingers” or if autocorrect is trying to change “Jones” to “Jeans”, it becomes even more challenging.
I just tried looking up my co-founder Paul Tyma to see how many taps on my mobile phone it would take to get to know him better.
It took 11 taps on LinkedIn, 13 taps on Facebook, and 15 taps on Twitter to get to relevant info about Paul. For a casual Facebook user it will take some scrolling and additional taps to get to the big news from the past couple of years. Twitter tempts me to read tech news on my Home screen or check my Notifications before I can start my research. As I scroll down and skim weeks of tweets, I hope I’m not missing anything relevant.
If I’ve exchanged email with him, if we’re both on Foursquare, and if I have Evernote notes about him, that’s another 25 taps at least. Looking him up on Crunchbase, AngelList and Googling his blog and Wikipedia pages brings the total number of taps to a whopping 182. It’s a good thing there are only eight letters in his name!
Here are a few tips to help you prepare for important events and get to know people faster, hopefully with a lot fewer taps!
Preparing for a Job Interview
Of course you’ll want to be prepared before you walk into that next job interview by doing your online research. “It only takes 15-20 minutes to learn enough about the employer to be able to speak more intelligently about them than much of your competition” . It’s wise to “talk to current employees. Show initiative while getting a feel for the office environment. Learn as much as you can about the company from people who work there.” Refresh can help with this part. In case you don’t already have an “in” at the company, you can use the “Ask a friend” Action to identify people you have in common at the company and reach out to them via email.
Preparing for a Networking Event
When possible, ask event sponsors beforehand for a list of participants. If it’s an Eventbrite or Meetup event, this information may be available online. “You don’t need to memorize the entire list or where each person comes from. You can make a mental note of 3-5 persons who you definitely may want to speak to. Perhaps, the host’s assistant could connect you prior to or during the event to your guest of interest.”
“If you can’t obtain a list before the event, go a little early and ask the organizer for the information and then identify who you would like to meet. Look for people who are associated with organizations you would like to research or work for.”
If it’s an event for your college alumni society, “Identify alumni who are working in fields or for employers of interest and make sure that you find a way to approach them at the event.” Before you go, “Research their field, employer or industry” (Refresh has you covered here!) so you can learn more about the latest trends and news in their field of expertise. These insights will help you ask the kinds of intelligent questions that will make you more memorable.
Preparing for a Scheduled Meeting
Including attendees’ first and last names in your calendar events will automatically show you their dossiers in Refresh. You can also add them using the “+” symbol next to the meeting name. When you meet, “Don’t hesitate to offer information about yourself as long as it’s appropriate to the workplace,” says psychologist Robert Cialdini in Dorie Clark’s article “How to Get Someone to Like You Immediately”. “There’s research that shows that self-disclosure is reciprocal.” That means that if you share details about yourself, “people will tell you about themselves and when you hit on a commonality, all of a sudden there’s rapport.”
At Refresh we’re incorporating more insights all the time to make it easier to learn more about the people you meet, with as few taps in the app interface as possible. Instead of poring through months of Tweets and Facebook status updates, instead of scrolling through years of a person’s background on LinkedIn, we deliver just the most relevant information for your upcoming meetings.
A colleague who comes from a business development background tells me when he is in the field, he rarely gets a chance to sit down in front of his laptop. All of his business communication is done on his mobile phone during the course of his busy day. So being able to use Refresh has made it possible to do due diligence on his upcoming meetings, even when the meeting is called at the last minute. Where once he might have been ill-prepared for a meeting, he’s now ready to talk about a number of things that his clients have been blogging and tweeting about. Once he was daunted by the amount of furious clicking he had to do to look up a new sales lead. Now he just adds their name to the subject line of a meeting and Refresh does the work for him, calling up their dossier with plenty of time to spare before his next meeting.
How about you? Has Refresh reduced the number of taps you need to do to learn about your connections? Tweet @RefreshApp or send email to community@refresh.io to tell us about your experience.
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