Dirk Verburg

An important, and extremely rewarding, service I offer clients in my executive coaching practice, is to help senior leaders who are unemployed, or run the risk of losing their job, to find a new role.

An integral part of the search strategy I define with my clients is to review and test their existing network through activating it very early in their search process. Reason being of course, that networks are one of the best channels to find a new role.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, I recommend that you to do the same: start activating your network as soon as possible. Why? Because there is a considerable chance that, like many of my clients, you will discover that your network is not as strong as you think.

Once you start activating your network for your job search, you will quickly see that all your contacts fall in one of these 5 categories: Ghosts, Sympathizers, Google-Lights, Weak connectors, or Referrers, …and that the first three are completely useless.

1. Ghosts

Ghosts are people that do not react if you reach out to them for a meeting (even if they were the ones initially offering this). Here you probably miscalculated the nature of your relationship. Where you saw friendship, or at least some form of a long term relationship, your counterpart only saw one or more (potential) business transactions.

A typical subdivision of this category are suppliers that were interested in you when you were in a position to award mandates or assignments, but are not interested in you anymore since you stopped being a (potential) ATM for them.

2. Sympathizers

Sympathizers are people who will take the trouble of meeting with you and express their sympathy, but do not offer any practical help. Conversations with sympathizers tend to dwell on the past (‘I am so sorry, this should never have happened to you’), whereas you should be looking at the future.

Even worse, some sympathizers think the meeting should actually circle around them. A fantastic example is a client of mine who reached out to an influential CHRO for help in her job search, only to be asked by the same CHRO during their meeting if she could help him to land another Non-Executive Director (NED) mandate… Let’s just say this CHRO had not read the memo about what the meeting was about.

3. ‘Google lights’

In this category you find people who are happy to talk to you, but think you might not be able to use Google and therefore see it as their role to act as your personal Google light. They offer superfluous suggestions to look into companies and opportunities you looked into on Day 1.

A typical recommendation in the category might be: ‘You studied accounting, have you ever considered KPMG?’ (‘You are an astronaut. Have you ever thought about joining NASA?’). People who send you messages with ‘I saw this job on LinkedIn’ fall into the same category. They probably think that you are unable to set-up a LinkedIn search agent.

All in all, ‘Google lights’ provide you well-intended, but basically useless advice.

4. Weak connectors

The first interesting category in the context of your search are people who provide you with ‘low quality’ contacts. Weak connectors bring you in touch with people who work for companies you might want to work for, but who are not key decision makers (hiring managers) or important advisors (HR Business Partners) in these companies.

Far-fetched as these contact suggestions might seem to be at first, it is important to follow them up.

The reason why stems from Mark Granovetter’s concept of ‘The Strength of Weak Ties’. The counter-intuitive discovery of Mark Granovetter’s research about the role of personal networks in finding new roles was that a person’s weak ties – casual connections and loose acquaintances – are much more important in finding work, than their strong ties. The implication for job seekers is that they should pay attention to identify and build these weak ties, i.e. follow-up all contact suggestions from ‘Weak Connectors’ that seem to be somehow plausible.

5. Referrers

‘Referrers ‘ are by far the most important category in your existing network. What the ‘Weak connectors’ and ‘Referrers’ have in common is that they will both open their address book for you. However, the advantage of the Referrers compared to the Weak Connectors is that Referrers are able to connect you directly with key decision makers or their close advisers – and often will send an introduction email or LinkedIn message on your behalf.

They are, to quote Malcolm Gladwell, the ‘Very Few’ that can make a big difference.

Pareto Principle

If you apply the Pareto Principle to networking, you will notice that 20% of your network will deliver 80% of your results. This means that 4 out of the 5 people you approach will either be ‘Ghosts’, ‘Sympathizers’, or ‘Google lights’, and that you will have to invest a lot of time and energy to make sure you connect with the 20% of your network that will actually prove to be useful. 4-5 painstakingly organized, time-consuming ‘let’s meet over a coffee’ meetings, might result in only one referral, so if you want 10 referrals, you need to have 40-50 of these meetings…

This means that size matters: the bigger your network, the larger your 20% will be. Therefore, expanding your network during a job search is at least as important as using your current one.

Of course, this does not mean connecting for connecting’s sake, but it does mean keeping a strong focus on exploiting the principle of the Strength of Weak ties…

By the way: For whom will you open your address book this week?