This is an excerpt from The Office Snitch. To read the full blog post, click here.

I’ll be honest with you. Sometimes, just the thought of networking makes me so nervous, I’d rather sit in the dentist’s chair on a ship during the perfect storm.

As I’m always dealing with HR practitioners, one question I’m often asked is: “How do HR people fare when it comes to networking?”

I think HR professionals have, over the course of time, been classified as introverted paper-pushers who only step out of their offices to fire someone or rob them of their laptop privileges.

Although I’ll admit HR folks I’ve met are slightly more reserved than the PR, marketing and creative teams I work with on an equally regular basis, calling them introverts is as far from the truth as possible.

HR leaders are networking daily with one of the most important groups of people they work with: the organisation’s employees themselves.

As the HR function continues to take on more strategic and critical roles within businesses, HR leaders find themselves making presentations, presenting cases and implementing policies. On top of that, they’re also dealing with a steady stream of employee queries, and transactional and admin duties. While your corporate comms and PR peers are busy managing relations with the outside world, HR is doing exactly the same with the internal audience.

There isn’t really a science to it, but there are a couple of things you can do to make networking less a pain, and more a gain.

To hear what those in the bottom few jobs had to say, click here.
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