How a weekly LinkedIn post, a credit and collections floor and one rule for a room full of strangers put people in front of opportunities.
In 2021 the returns were slow. The post went up on a Saturday, asked professionals to say who they were and what they did, and on an average week 10 to 15 of them answered. The man behind it had seen other people use the same hashtag to post about their jobs and interests and felt “it needed a next-level approach.” So he added a poll. “Sometimes professionals may not want to post a comment, but they will vote on a poll in passing,” he says. The poll numbers went up, impressions reached the tens of thousands, and the post started growing sections.
Today a #SocialSaturday post from Jeremy L. Neal, MBA, MS, carries a list of professionals tagged to connect with one another, an #opentowork section where he highlights five people a week with their bios linked for recruiters, a Post of the Week, and a list of other Social Saturday parties running the same morning. One September post this year named 15 people in the connect-with section, linked five #opentowork bios and drew 99 votes on its poll. “I’m not the only one hosting a party weekly,” Jeremy says. “I can say that 5+ years later, it has blown up to something that I could not imagine.”
The people he most wants reading this are “those who do not know which path to take or just want to network,” and the ones marked #opentowork. There are a lot of them. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 7.1 million unemployed Americans in September 2026, 1.9 million of them out of work for 27 weeks or more. Jeremy spent 2008 to 2022 at AT&T, most recently as Manager of Credit and Collections in San Antonio, and in 2021 co-founded Untapped Recruiting, a recruiting and career development firm. His answer to why most networking never puts anyone in front of an opportunity has two sides, and the first one is a rule for a room.
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One Foot In and One Foot Out
“I feel that this is twofold,” Jeremy says. “On one side, I feel that professionals are not intentional enough with their networking.” He allows for the introvert and extrovert dynamic, which “can cause a little pause,” but his fix isn’t to work harder at the whole room. “What I promote with networking is that you do not try to connect with everyone in the room…find one professional and be intentional throughout that conversation. It’s more about quality than quantity!”
“You cannot have 1 foot in and 1 foot out; you have to be all-in when you are meeting professionals around the world.”
Jeremy L. Neal, MBA, MS, host of #SocialSaturday and co-founder of Untapped Recruiting
The other side of the coin, as he puts it, sits inside companies. “My feeling is that leaders are not forthcoming with information that works within companies on the best networking tactics. There are professionals right now who have been in their roles for far too long because, simply put, they don’t know how to network or meet people within their organization.” He has a particular floor in mind when he says it.
The Credit and Collections Floor
“I came in on April 16, 2021, and I must admit…I didn’t have a plan,” Jeremy wrote later, in a post thanking the representatives of AT&T’s credit and collections organization in San Antonio. Before his time as their manager, the representatives in the call center complained of not having opportunities to develop a resume, be part of leadership development programs, or get help being promoted into a new role. He set up development sessions, starting with one on the RISE program with Nicole Perrotta.
After that session, one representative, Margerea Wright, signed up for the program. She graduated, took a new role as Senior Records Clerk and in 2025 was promoted into management. Another, Shon Berry, was on the verge of retirement and felt it was best to move on to another company. Jeremy got involved with her resume, professional bio and interview skills. She went through the Management Development Program, was promoted to the Management Support Team and, in his words, “provided senior leadership with a development idea that spread across the AT&T spectrum.”
The sessions didn’t stay on his floor. He spoke at a career development session for The NETwork, AT&T’s employee group chapter in Atlanta, where more than 60 employees got “a detailed overview of how to use LinkedIn to build a platform for their personal and professional development,” and the session earned him a nomination for a DEI in Excellence Award. The same job gave him his hard moment, and he tells it in one line: “September 2021, as a Manager of Credit and Collections, our team’s metrics were going in the wrong direction…I implemented a new 60/40 policy which saw our team’s metrics surge by 10%.” The moment he counts as his greatest came from the same job too, and not from the floor.
Four Students, Two Coaches and a Professor
“Something that sticks with me that I feel is my greatest professional moment was mentoring students at Howard University during the AT&T HBCU Innovation Challenge in 2022,” Jeremy says. The team was four students, two coaches from AT&T and a professor, and the brief was an idea using AT&T Wi-Fi technologies that could lead to implementation by the company. They settled on a smart recycling bin that separated trash from recyclable items and alerted local waste management services when it was full for pickup. Over a month, Jeremy coached the students and worked on their presentation techniques. They took first place and the $75,000 prize, split between the students.
“It was a special moment for me because I can go back and say not only did I mentor youth, but I helped with the financial strains that weigh on college students on a day-in, day-out basis.”
Jeremy, host of #SocialSaturday and co-founder of Untapped Recruiting
“These types of projects, I shied away from early on in my professional career…I’m forever indebted to those students because they made me a better professional!” AT&T named him a Dream in Black Future Maker that year and gave him a Service Excellence Award, his second after one in 2015. By then he was already sitting on the other side of the hiring table.
The Same Well
In January 2021 Jeremy co-founded Untapped Recruiting, a recruiting and career development firm connecting professionals with employment opportunities across multiple industries, and hosted and produced the Untapped Podcast, interviewing industry leaders, recruiters and professionals about career insights and hiring trends. The firm’s work, as his profile describes it, ran from resume and LinkedIn profile optimization and one-on-one career coaching to the relationships with employers, recruiters and hiring managers that put candidates in front of them. From 2023 to 2026 he also worked at Optimal Ticketing in San Antonio, ending as Business Development Strategist, analyzing NCAA business development opportunities for senior leadership.
What did building Untapped teach him about how people actually get hired? “What I learned is that professionals must be able to adapt and pivot. Just because one tactic worked, it doesn’t mean that you can continue to come back to the same ‘well’ and expect that tactic to work again and again.” The lesson cuts both ways. “Leaders and Recruiters must be more intentional about researching candidates or prepare for massive turnover in markets, which does not help those who are still unemployed and increases costs to organizations, as onboarding is not cheap.”
“For those who are seeking employment, adapting is the key. You may have to have 4-5 different resumes to highlight your skills based on the jobs that you are applying for.”
Jeremy, host of #SocialSaturday and co-founder of Untapped Recruiting
Then there is the step he sees people skip. “An often missed opportunity is asking for feedback after interviews. Yes, you may not receive a response from every employer, but gaining that feedback can help you for future interviews and interactions with employers and recruiters.” Ask for it with the thank-you, he says, because it “shows that you have a genuine interest in not only your own personal development but also the organization that you applied for.” The adapting started a long way from San Antonio.
Monroe, Louisiana
The record starts at the Ouachita Parish District Attorney’s Office, where Jeremy was a misdemeanor clerk and student worker from 2001 to 2005 and twice Employee of the Month. In 2007 he graduated from Northwestern State University with two bachelor’s degrees, in Business Administration and Computer Information Systems, with a minor in Criminal Justice. AT&T came in 2008, in Shreveport, as a customer assistant and team lead, where the two people who shaped how he works were his managers. “Benny Thompson and Ayanaca Boone. They were two of my first managers in Shreveport, Louisiana, and helped shape my leadership approach.”
From Shreveport he moved to San Antonio in 2010 as a Tier II technical support representative and team lead, to tech social media support in 2014, and to Austin in 2018 as a senior specialist in technical customer service and network support. In Austin he founded “Tools To Reach 2020 Personal Development Goals,” which led to a Women of AT&T national webinar heard by 350 employees. Four sessions in 2019 and one in 2020 reached more than 2,000. He added an MBA in Human Resources from DeVry’s Keller Graduate School in 2013 and a Master of Science in Technology Management from North Carolina A&T in 2020. The habit colleagues would call very him is a time motto: “To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late, to be late is to face the consequences.”
The San Antonio Business Journal named him to its 40 Under 40 class of 2023, “selected from 300+ nominations,” as he wrote the morning after, and the same year the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Incorporated, where he has been a Life Member since 2017, named him 9th District Omega Man of the Year. He sums the whole stretch up in a line he says is his: “I’m just a kid from Monroe, Louisiana straight out of Carroll High School that had a dream to be great in everything I do.”
Where Jeremy Is Now
His line for what he is doing now is “Building Networks Brick By Brick,” and the bricks go down on Saturdays. One September post opened “Happy #SocialSaturday #LinkedIn Family,” and the rule in it is simple: anyone who answers yes on the poll, reacts or comments gets a place in next week’s connect-with section. During the week his feed carries reposts of other people’s hiring posts for those marked #opentowork. The post signs off the way he signs off: “Lastly, be sure to tag others to the party! Tag a friend, tell a friend!”
What he wants from the next twelve months is new people in that thread, and for the piece to serve as “a sense of motivation for those who have come from nothing to become something in their lives.” He is specific about who. “There are several who are #opentowork currently, and maybe one visit will help change their perspective or approach to their next opportunity.” Asked what is next, he gives one line: “Continue to help professionals build their networks while helping organizations to bring in top talent.”
Outside the thread and the fraternity, there is bowling. “I love to go bowling. One of my recent scores was a 278.” And there is the rest of what he wrote after the 40 Under 40 night. “I haven’t reached my goal as I have a long way to go, but with God leading the way and the support I have…I’ll eventually get there. There is still so much more work to do and this is just the start.”
Five Lines from Jeremy’s Diary
“You cannot have 1 foot in and 1 foot out; you have to be all-in when you are meeting professionals around the world.”
“Find one professional and be intentional throughout that conversation. It’s more about quality than quantity!”
“For those who are seeking employment, adapting is the key.”
“I’m forever indebted to those students because they made me a better professional!”
“Tag a friend, tell a friend!”
From the Diary of Jeremy L. Neal
Jeremy L. Neal, MBA, MS, is a San Antonio-based host of #SocialSaturday on LinkedIn and the co-founder of Untapped Recruiting (2021 to 2026).
| Role | Host of #SocialSaturday on LinkedIn; Co-Founder, Untapped Recruiting, LLC (2021 to 2026) |
| Based in | San Antonio, Texas |
| Previously with | AT&T, 2008 to 2022, most recently Manager of Credit and Collections; Optimal Ticketing, 2023 to 2026 |
| Also with | Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Incorporated, Life Member |
“I’m just a kid from Monroe, Louisiana straight out of Carroll High School that had a dream to be great in everything I do.”
Editor’s Note
The editors chose Jeremy L. Neal for the way he answers the question of why networking fails: with a rule for a room, and a record of what happened when he applied it on a credit and collections floor. The #SocialSaturday post has run every week since 2021 and carries named people, linked bios and a poll, which makes it checkable in a way most networking advice is not. The Howard University challenge and the two representatives he describes give the piece results with names and numbers attached. He asked that the piece reach people who do not know which path to take, and it is written for them.
Executives Diary, Editorial
