The deposit before the withdrawal

Two weeks back I wrote about a senior IT leader I've been talking to. Twenty-two years in. Eight months into a search with no interviews from cold applications. The one interview that came close, the one where he made it to a final round, came from a former colleague who walked his resume into a hiring manager's office.

That kind of interview is what I called a champion outcome. The slice of the search that actually has a hit rate above zero.

The case for champions was the easy part of that newsletter. Without one, your application is one of 250 in a stack. With one, it's the one HR is told to look at first.

What I didn't unpack is the part people get stuck on. How do you actually build that kind of relationship?

I posted about a piece of this last Thursday. Three DMs I sent in the last 30 days that were not asks. A note to a VP about a feature I admired. One to a former colleague about a candidate I knew well. A reaction to something a founder had written.

None were planned campaigns. None led with a need. They were small, specific acts of attention.

The pattern in those three messages is what's worth zooming in on this week.

What you're actually building when you build a network

A champion doesn't form from one conversation. A champion forms from a pattern of conversations, over time, where the cumulative weight of attention adds up to a specific belief. That belief is something like: "I know what this person is good at. I've seen them think. I'd vouch for them in a real decision."

That sentence is the actual product you're building when you build a network.

What you're building isn't connections. It isn't LinkedIn followers, it isn't an email list, it isn't even a contact database. The product is something smaller and harder to count: a group of three to twelve people who can finish that sentence about you with specificity.

Specificity is the part that breaks most networks. Specificity requires evidence. Evidence requires that the other person has seen you in motion, recently enough that the memory is sharp.

If the most recent thing you did with someone who could be your champion was three years ago, the memory has gone fuzzy. They might still like you. They probably can't tell a story about your work that would convince anyone to hire you for a senior role.

This is where deposits come in.

A deposit isn't a maintenance ping. And it's definitely not an ask.

A deposit is a small, specific act that gives someone fresh evidence of who you are right now. It's not the same as staying in touch. "Hey, how have you been" is not a deposit, it's a maintenance ping. Maintenance pings keep the connection from going dead, but they don't add evidence.

A deposit adds evidence. The note to the VP added evidence that I notice product decisions and have a real perspective on them. The note to the former colleague added evidence that I'm thinking about hiring problems and have a candidate I'd vouch for. The reaction to the founder added evidence that I read his writing closely enough to engage with it on his level.

Each one was, in part, an exchange of identity. The person on the receiving end now has a fresher sense of what I'm thinking about, what I'm working on, what I notice. If a hiring decision came up next year, they'd have a story to tell.

The hard part isn't writing the deposit. The hard part is doing it when nothing's at stake.

When you're job searching, you have urgency. The urgency tempts you toward asks, because asks feel productive. A deposit doesn't feel productive. You send the note and the immediate ROI is zero. The reply might be polite, the relationship might not get richer, six months might pass.

This is why the practice has to start before the search. By the time you need the relationship, the window to build it is closed.

The math, two versions

What this looks like in practice, for someone who's not currently in a search, is one deposit a week. Not five. One real, specific, useful act of attention, sent to one person who could matter.

That's about fifty deposits a year. If 80% of them go nowhere, you still have ten genuine relationships maturing in the background. After three years of that, you have a real network. Not in the LinkedIn sense. In the sense that someone could pick up a phone and vouch for your work.

For someone already in a search, the math is harder. You can't manufacture three years of deposits in three weeks. What you can do is restart the practice now, knowing it probably won't pay off for the current role but might pay off for the next one. And every so often, a deposit you make this week opens a door this month, because the timing happens to line up.

The IT leader I started with has been running this practice for about six weeks. Three deposits a week, none of them asks. Too early to say whether any will turn into champions. He's noticed something else, though. The act of paying attention to other people's work has changed what his own work feels like. He's seeing patterns across companies. He's getting fresher takes on his own situation.

Whether or not it produces a job, it's producing the version of him that would be worth vouching for in the first place.

One deposit this week

If you take one thing from this week:

The work happens before the need. Send one deposit this week. Pick one person who could matter. Pay attention to something they've actually been doing, write the two sentences that show you noticed, and send it. Don't tie it to anything. Don't follow up unless they reply. Don't track it in a spreadsheet.

You're not building a campaign. You're starting a practice.

The first deposit takes ten minutes and feels like nothing. By the fiftieth one, it's something else.