If you’re applying for an internship or analyst position in finance, you are likely aware that networking with professionals in the industry is an instrumental part of the recruitment process. Building connections with professionals in the industry can help you become more informed about the industry and different firms. Most importantly, networking can increase your chances of having your resume reviewed by the correct people.

However, just sending out mass amounts of emails sporadically in an untargeted fashion is not the most productive way to approach networking. Instead, you should develop a systematic process that is organized, targeted, and thoughtful. Here’s how to do it.

Finding Contacts

You can start finding contacts by looking through your network, student organizations, and alumni groups. However, most successful candidates go beyond this approach to connect with professionals in the industry.

Next, find additional professionals that you want to network with. This is most commonly done via LinkedIn. There are two paid services that are widely agreed upon to be extremely useful in the networking process: LinkedIn Premium and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn Premium

LinkedIn Premium is $60 a month, and allows users unlimited advanced search privileges, as well as unlimited visibility of your extended network (to find more contacts once you have connected on the platform with the professional you originally reached out to).

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an enterprise or premium version of LinkedIn Premium. It offers all that is included with LinkedIn Premium, but it also offers even more advanced search options and allows you to make a list of all your saved contacts on the platform. The only downfall of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is that it is pricier at $100 per month.

One way to save money is to only sign up for a month or two of these services so that you can quickly build out a contact list. If you need to build out the list further in a few months, you could sign up for an extra month.

With both Premium and Sales Navigator, you can execute targeted searches for professionals in the industry. One example is to filter your search to LinkedIn users who are alumni of your university and work in the finance industry. You can also filter based on a common experience or organization, such as a business fraternity, business organization, social fraternity or sorority, or scholarship organization.

Once you have run these searches and have found contacts, then it is time to create emails and add them to your networking list.

Finding and Verifying Email Addresses

Once you have a contact’s name and the company they work for, you have everything you need to find their email address. We recommend reaching out to professionals over email rather than LinkedIn, because email is better at getting their attention.

Every company has their own email format or template. For example, if you were interested in speaking with a finance professional at Goldman Sachs, you could search the internet for the Goldman Sachs email format which is “firstname.lastname@gs.com”.

There are numerous websites to easily find email addresses. We recommend Hunter.io and RocketReach. Once you have discovered the email address, you will need to verify that it is a legitimate email, meaning that it is in existence, which you can do by navigating to MailTester.

You should test the email before you send it to avoid the email not getting to the intended recipient. For example, if you find Johnathan Doe who works at Goldman Sachs, his email could be johnathan.doe@gs.com or john.doe@gs.com. By verifying it the email address you are likely going to save yourself time.

Creating a Networking List

Once you have all the contact info for the individuals you’d like to reach out to, create an Excel spreadsheet that has a list of all these professionals on it. It doesn’t have to be perfectly formatted as it is for your own use, but it should include a column for the professional’s:

• Name

• Company they work at

• Email address

• City they work in

• Phone number

• Last contact date

You can also add columns for any other relevant information you find. Then, you can segment the sheet via tabs by city, company, or any other segmentation that works best for you.

When you send a professional an email or get on a call, you should update this list so stay current with who you have talked to, when you talked to them, and when it is appropriate to follow up.