My friend, Jamie, sends in the following anecdote. It tells you how to asses who is worth your time and who isn’t.
I have a certain "rule" in place when I network with people.
When I left Barnard for my first job, I entered myself in the alumnae database indicating I would be willing to talk to current students about my job/career path.
As I changed jobs and developed my career, I always updated my information and over the years I got e-mails from students interested in chatting with me about work, mostly they were looking for jobs and wanted to know how I got my job in news and how I could help them get one as well.
In the beginning, I would email back and forth with some of them but that took a lot of time and energy.
I decided chatting over the phone was an easier way to disseminate my wisdom; I could do it quickly, perhaps while walking to work or folding my laundry, but more importantly I could tell immediately whether the person was actually serious about hearing from me or was just going through the motions of "networking."
So, I changed my policy. I gave them my phone number and told them I would be happy to speak by phone.
An amazing thing happened. In almost every single case, that ended the connection! I never heard from the people again. The ones who followed through either called me or emailed back to set up a time to chat.
It was a remarkable weeding process since the ones who were willing to chat by phone happened to be really interesting people that I was delighted to help.
I was able to place two of them in internships, one at MSNBC and one at CNN. I was able to make further connections for others. And, I was happy to do this because these people were obviously committed to real networking.
It has proved to be a remarkably efficient process because 9 times out of 10 people don't want to make the effort to call so I'm not wasting much energy.
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