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Keith Bogen
How to Make Networking Work
Keith Bogen, SHRM-SCP/SPHR is the Senior Human Resources Business Partner and Business Development Consultant for Medbar Group, a progressive and extremely innovative concierge healthcare organization.
Originally founded to bring dental services to the workplace, pandemic times saw a broader way to help the world, so the company has grown to become a leading nationwide provider of an array of medical services at the workplace, including Covid testing, vaccinations, hearing and vision screening, biometrics and annual physicals.
Keith is a 25-year HR practitioner, serving as Director, Manager, Business Partner and Consultant for a variety of companies and clients across many industries, most notably healthcare, technology and pharmaceuticals. The founder of well-known networking group for human resources practitioners, Whine & Dine Networking, he has developed a global network within HR of tens of thousands of participants in all 50 states and 40 countries around the world. An avid softball player and driving enthusiastic, he is known for bringing people together for business and social purposes and demonstrating the theory of six degrees of separation and how it impacts everything in life.
Hang around long enough and you will know all about his two sons, Justin who is a senior accounting major at the University of South Carolina and Jeremy, a freshman computer science major at Ohio State University. Developing networking machines… they just don’t know that yet!
More from Keith…
Networking is not just for the person searching for a job. Keith knows that connections you make in life can make a difference years down the road.
“There was a middle period of time in [my] career where 11 of the years I was a independent consultant. I had like 35 different clients in the 11 years. I found, I remember this really clearly, of those 35 clients was either one or two, I found by an answering an ad. The rest of it was all because of who I knew. So, even from a pure job search perspective, one job at the beginning of my HR career in the 90s, and two clients out of 35 throughout that whole window of time, were gotten from traditional sources, we’ll call it that. Everything else was networking. Everything else was who I knew, constantly being introduced the right people at the right time, sometimes being introduced to people who came up with opportunities for me, a year later, or three years later, or in one story that I tell eight years later.
That’s another thing that I’m very passionate about. When I do a presentation on networking, my favorite presentation is called Stop Looking for a Job, Start Building Your Career. Where it comes from is the idea that people, when they need a job, but they’ll only talk to the people they think can help them right then right now. If they see 10 people to only talk to one or two because of those of the two that they’re looking to have a connection right now. The other eight, forget it. Except they might have connections later at other times or have other opportunities for them or do other things that might influence or change or bless their lives in some ways. I want people to talk to everyone as part of their social fabric not just to get something.”
