Joe Stevens On Professional Networking: Quality, Not Quantity
Few months ago, I received a message in my LinkedIn inbox: “Hey Liliana, you may want to join our community” and a link to a LinkedIn group. Shortly after, the person follows up with a few more details on what the group was all about. I joined, and from there we started discussing more and more, creating a link that I wouldn’t have foreseen.
To put it bluntly, I’ve never met Joe Stevens in person. We didn’t even work previously together. But the power of networking made us cross paths and today I am bringing his inspiring career story to you as well as his views on professional networking that we may all benefit from. Enjoy!
Joe Stevens has a quite unique story career-wise: with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in History, Joe managed to secure a job in an internet company that in his own words was “open to opportunities”. As he navigated his journey from sales office manager, to provisioning to engineering, to technology, he built a cross-functional experience and a proven reputation that enabled him to relocate from the United States to Europe in less than 5 years. Since he arrived first in London, he has lived in 4 different countries in Europe, where he resides still. He feels he was the right person at the right moment, yet as he talks about his experiences, there are a few things that seem to be the key of his professional success.
Growing through aptitude and attitude
I asked Joe how did he manage to build a career in such a technical field, without having the studies in the domain. He simply replied he was curious and willing to learn more, he worked hard to prove his value and build a reputation. “It’s hard work” he says “people read stories on LinkedIn and they believe it, but they need to understand that it’s hard work to get there, it doesn’t happen overnight.” As he puts it, companies sometimes need to hire for aptitudes and attitude, which is more important than the degree you have.
Even in his position as a hiring manager, during interviews he’s looking first to understand if the person has analytical thinking and only after he’s checking the skillset or the experience. “Small companies usually need to hire people with experience, while bigger companies can hire more junior people and train them” he says. What Joe highlighted, and I have seen this often throughout my professional recruitment career, is that what seems to weigh most in the hiring decision, is the potential of the candidate. Sometimes, this is the deciding factor in separating two candidates apart from the other. And this is what he was able to show too during his career journey — good aptitude and the right attitude. This made him a trusted partner to the companies and colleagues who worked with him and eventually enabled his career growth.
International Career Challenges
As an expat myself, I know that relocation and adapting to a new culture and language can be challenging. So, I was naturally curious to find out Joe’s experience. I was expecting a long list of challenges, yet he was concise: “you will not have a support system, so you will have to build one; you may not know the language, so you need to make sure you are in an English friendly environment and it will be very useful to learn at least some basics in the local language too.”
With many professionals interested to relocate abroad, Joe made another pertinent observation, that is often overlooked in international mobility discussions: the importance of understanding macroeconomics, because they will heavily influence our career. To this point, you will need to research the local political and economic context and ensure that your skills will be in demand on the local market. He recommends also consulting websites like sifted.eu and seedtable.com to identify unique opportunities in start-ups. They might be riskier, but if they are scaling rapidly you will be growing with them. The only situation when macroeconomics will have less influence on your career, Joe believes, is when the skillset is in high demand, for instance in new technology skillsets: devops, data scientists, AI, privacy & cybersecurity.
Networking: Quality, Not Quantity
Joe enabled his career opportunities through the power of professional networking too. He strongly believes it is essential in life not to be isolated, to continuously build, maintain and expand the support ecosystem and network of professional and personal friends around you: “I keep it simple: life is an adventure; your career should be too. And adventures aren’t fun and joyful unless you are opening your mind up. With every engagement, new culture, new person you meet, you’re becoming more human and fuller. You always want to learn, connect and be fulfilled.“
The real need of networking sits in the fact that we “don’t know everything and business is always changing. So, every engagement with another human being or a company is an opportunity to learn more.” That’s how Joe ended up connecting with key people that supported him directly or indirectly throughout the stages of his career.
“You want to connect for quality not for quantity” Joe continues. “And your connections will serve different purposes.” From his point of view, there are 3 main categories of connections you may want to have: connections for future opportunities – for instance, if you are looking for a job, you should be connecting with people who work in Talent Acquisition. Then, you need to connect with people from your career domain, especially with those who are producing good content that you may be able to learn from. And last, but not least, connect with people with whom you may share similar interests: like your friends, former school colleagues, people who work in domains you like following and people whose careers you find interesting. Keep yourself open to connections to enable opportunity, but aim for quality so that it ends up serving you.
Europe Career Support Initiative
Back in July 2023, while in a career break, Joe started noticing more #opentowork banners on LinkedIn. He felt the banner was not effective, noticing that week in and week out profiles on LinkedIn were just repeatedly sending out the same standard LinkedIn announcement to their same network connections. There was no profound substantive collaboration or support for job seekers. Based on his experience and his expansive career across Europe he wanted to simply ‘do good’ and decided to create a LinkedIn group that enabled the power of networking.
He had the idea of creating a peer-to-peer collaboration group on LinkedIn called Europe Career Support (ECS), to support professionals through his and others’ LinkedIn networks they had built over the years — an ecosystem of professional support network linking job seekers to talent acquisition professionals. He started by inviting jobs seekers, talent acquisitions professionals and volunteers and actively promoted the group, focusing on social impact mission of the community. Slowly, the ECS Community grew and evolved. After 3 months an ECS Ambassadors program was launched and newsletters created to aide members while promoting and encouraging partners supporting the community. He consistently encouraged members and partners to engage one another, interact and collaborate; always motivating members to support each other. The group continues to grow to this day, professionals reach out to each other to learn about opportunities, ask for guidance, career advice, country resources and professional knowledge. Most recently ECS initiated a City Social Program where ECS Ambassadors are organizing face-to-face city events, with the first in Prague, the next in Krakow and more planned in Lisbon, Madrid, Stockholm and elsewhere.
The ECS Community has grown over six months to over 4100+ members, which includes 500+ talent acquisition professionals, career experts, volunteers and hiring managers.
I’m happy to say that I was one of the earlier partners to join & support the group's social impact mission. Furthermore, on the homepage you will find the link to join ECS. Should you want to learn more, feel free to check it out!
When it comes to the group he created, Joe says being active there is the key: “Reach out to people and ask for a meeting. The worst a person can do is to say “no”. But be OK with people saying “no”. Continue to build connections, it’s not just a one-time thing. And remember that circumstances change, so go back to people and ask again.” Through networking you may meet incredible people.
This is after all, how I’ve met Joe.
