Hi everyone — Earnings season is well underway, with healthy results in the digital advertising world from Google and Meta being offset by weakness in Snap’s numbers. Also, today’s Strategy Spotlight covers a priortization framework for networking during your career search.

Prepare for your future in business. Subscribe to build your knowledge with exclusive business analysis and career advice

📰 News to Know

• 📈Q2 earnings highlights: Earnings seasons rolls on as the heavy hitters started reporting this week.

  • 👍Winners: Meta and Google both reported results that indicate resilience in their advertising business. Links to their respective earnings releases are embedded above.

  • 👎Losers: Revenue at Chipotle for the quarter came in below expectations, pushing the stock lower. Snap also reported weaker than expected revenue, and the stock continued an odd pattern of impoding post earnings.

  • ⏳Coming next week: Starbucks, AMD, Apple, and Amazon are among the many companies that will report their Q2 results next week 

• 🚗Cruising Along: GM’s autonomous division Cruise is now completing 10,000 driverless trips per week. Cruise offers driverless rides in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin at the moment.

• 💵“Higher for longer”: Jerome Powell and The Fed raised interest rates by 25bps this week. The move was expected, and the market is now pricing in several months of no rate movements as the Fed waits to see if inflation stays low or if further interest rate hikes are necessary.

🧠 Strategy Spotlight: Essential Framework for Networking Outreach

In my advising appointments with MBA students and recent grads I often talk about the importance of building in time to your application process to allow for networking outreach. Networking, with the objective of receiving a referral or connecting directly to the hiring manager, is one of the highest ROI activities that you can pursue during the application phase. I know that networking can also feel like a grind– finding the right person to message is time-consuming, those messages will often go unanswered, and finding time on people’s calendars can create bottlenecks in your application process. While acknowledging all of those points of frustration, I will reiterate the greater point above– it is one of only a few activities that can increase the probability of receiving a first interview and eventually an offer.

To demonstrate that point, I want to share two examples of successful networking outreach from advising appointments over the last few weeks that MBA students have shared with me in recent advising appointments: