HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR CONTACTS. Status: March 2017

Transcription

1 HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR CONTACTS Status: March 2017

2 INTRODUCTION Our guess is that you have plenty of business cards piled up in all different places (in your wallet, on the desk and in various drawers) and addresses scattered over various inboxes that urgently need to get organized for networking (and job hunting) purposes. THE PROCESS How to export: Go to page 3 for: Go to page 4 for:

3 HOW TO EXPORT YOUR CONTACTS FROM LINKEDIN Step 1: Login to your LinkedIn account and go to the tab My Network Step 3: Click on Manage synced and imported contacts Step 2: Choose See all option Step 4: Click on Export contacts Step 5: LinkedIn will ask you to sign in again. Once you do that, click on Download button in order to export your profile information. The status will change to Request pending, and after it changes again to Download click on the button again to download a zip file and save it on your computer Important: Before you export your LinkedIn contacts, make sure you have added everyone you may know! Step 6: After opening the zip file, you will see the list of all.csv files. The file Connections.csv is the one you may upload to Plaxo

4 GMAIL Click Gmail at the top-left corner of your Gmail page & choose Contacts. From the More drop-down menu, select Export. Choose all contact, select the Outlook CSV format & click Export. YAHOO OUTLOOK You will find detailed instructions here. You will find detailed instructions here. FACEBOOK XING Exporting contacts from Facebook involves two steps: 1) Exporting your Facebook contacts to Yahoo Mail, and 2) Exporting your friends from Yahoo to CSV or Outlook. You will find detailed instructions here. With a tool called XING Outlook Connector you can import all of your contacts from XING, and later import them from Outlook. You will find detailed instructions here.

5 HOW TO GATHER YOUR CONTACTS IN ONE PLACE Once you have all of your contacts from various sources in.csv files: open and save them in.xls or.odt copy / paste everything into one big master file or database, which we ll call Ready Contacts once done, go to the next page. Step 1: Open each.csv file (make sure you open the Step 2: Save the file containing all of file correctly) and gather all contacts in just one file (by your contacts as e.g. Ready Contacts.xls copy-pasting data from each of the.csv files) (or any other available format) Step 3: Organize your contacts: sort them alphabetically & delete those that are duplicated

6 HOW TO ORGANIZE YOUR CONTACTS FOR YOUR JOB SEARCH 1. Open the Ready Contacts file 2. Delete unnecessary columns (leave only the important ones, e.g. company, position, contact details etc.) 3. Add new columns: Type of contact (business / personal / both) Potentially strategic ( / no) Level of trust (on a scale from 1 to 10) 4. If necessary, you can also add columns like: Gender First name basis or not Language that you communicate in An example of a Ready Contacts database*: First Name John Jane John Jane John Last Name Smith White Smith White Smith Address john.smith@ .com jane.white@ .com john.smith@ .com jane.white@ .com john.smith@ .com Company Company A Company B Company C Company D Company E Position IT Specialist HR Director VP EMEA Project Manager HR Manager CEE Mobile Phone Type of contact personal business business personal both Potentially strategic no Level of trust *The information above is fictitious & serves as an example only. Please do not intent to contact Mr John Smith or ms Jane White :) What next? Your Career Angel will help you to go through the various groups to find the most appropriate approach, as well as texts for them. Read our blog Hidden Job Market for more useful tips! Grow your network!