Against Networking
Like many others, over the past year I have found myself forced to engage with the contemporary hiring market, offering up animal sacrifices to the ATS gods in a vain attempt to win their favor, and inspecting the charred bones to divine which precise combination of keywords stands between me and my ability to pay rent. Luckily, a raft of LinkedIn influencers has discovered One Weird Trick™ to increase your chances of being hired. Firing off resumes and filling out online job applications is a mug’s game, so they say. All the cool kids are getting into networking, and if you ever want to work again then you should too.
I’m unconvinced that networking as a job-hunting strategy is the silver bullet that it’s often presented as. While it’s doubtless useful for some, the advice to draw upon your network is simply not actionable for the majority of people receiving it. Furthermore, I believe that the shift away from job applications and towards networking as a means of getting hired is corrosive to the job market as a whole, and should be resisted by anyone with even a passing interest in meritocracy.
The first issue with the term “networking” is that it combines three very different concepts into one term: personal networks, professional networks, and cold outreach via platforms such as LinkedIn.
Personal networks
At first glance, the numbers make an obvious case: jobseekers who know someone at their target employer have a much better chance of being hired than “cold” applicants. So the answer is simple: just know someone at the companies you’re applying to and you’ll increase your odds of landing the job. However, this is akin to a financial adviser spotting that aspiring house buyers stand a much better chance of putting a deposit down on their dream home if they have rich parents, and therefore advising all of their clients to do likewise. Noticing a trend is one thing; having the ability to act on it is another altogether.
If I ever get hold of a time machine, as soon as I finish up my murderous rendezvous with Baby Hitler I’ll be sure to join Jensen Huang’s book club circa 2016 and snag myself a lucrative job at Nvidia. Until then, I’m stuck with my existing social circle, and alas I was foolish enough to make the career-stunting move of befriending people because I enjoy spending time with them rather than because of their job titles.
Full disclosure: I have “leveraged my personal network” exactly twice. First when I was thirteen years old and my parents helped me to get a minimum wage job waiting tables at the local hotel restaurant. And second when I immigrated to the US three years ago, badly in need of a job, and a friend of my wife’s kindly referred me to an open position at her nonprofit (I didn’t end up getting the job). The issue with that, however, is that my wife’s friend had no prior knowledge of my work, and could not speak to my skills or experience in any meaningful sense. The mere fact that we were socially acquainted was no reason to offer me an interview instead of any other qualified applicant.
This speaks to the problem: advantaging applicants because they are personally connected to an existing employee is a terrible way to discern who the best candidates actually are. While it’s an understandable impulse for friends and family to want to help out those they know and love with their job search, it is still nepotism, plain and simple, and deserves to be treated with the contempt which this label usually generates.
Personal networks tend to coalesce along socio-economic lines. We gravitate towards people who are like us — people with similar personality traits, similar backgrounds, similar demographics. People who attend prestigious schools are more likely to have friends who went to those same schools; those with rich parents are more likely to know others with rich parents. If you actively wanted to reduce the diversity of your workforce, there are few ways more effective than allowing candidates to use their personal networks in your hiring process.
If the rising importance of networking continues along its current trajectory, all sectors of the economy will soon end up like the entertainment industry, where the only way to break in is if your parents have their own Wikipedia pages, and aspiring entertainers must establish personal connections with industry gatekeepers if they want to make it big (a system which Harvey Weinstein’s lawyers tell me has never, ever resulted in abuse of any kind). Is this really the future we want for ourselves?
Professional networks
If using personal networks while job hunting is problematic, then surely using professional networks is completely above board? After all, no-one is better placed to speak to the quality of your work than someone you’ve already worked with in a professional setting.
However, for current jobseekers the advice to use your professional network is often not realistic. Just as the people banks most want to lend to are those who need the money the least, the best time to engage your professional network is when you already have a well-paying job. When you’re a high-flying professional who might be able to give someone a leg up, everyone wants to network with you. Not so much when you’re laid off and desperately trying to make ends meet.
Furthermore, the numbers involved in contemporary job hunting just don’t make this a particularly viable strategy. Perhaps in Silicon Valley, where a handful of Big Tech firms incestuously poach each other’s employees, you stand a good chance of knowing someone at each of your target firms. But for most of us, there are hundreds upon hundreds of potential employers (and in the current hiring market, hundreds of applications required), of which only a small fraction will employ someone you have previously worked alongside. Of the roughly 200 employers I have applied to over the past year, I have had a professional connection at exactly two of them (I didn’t get an interview with either). Something tells me I’m not atypical in this regard.
While it may make perfect sense to the individual recruiter to garner referrals from existing employees in order to quickly generate a pool of promising applicants, at the aggregate level this behavior produces many of the same problems as those described in the previous section. Firstly, a professional network may simply be a personal network at one step removed. The kid who interns at their dad’s company will no doubt generate a lot of valuable professional connections in the process, but that doesn’t make it any less nepotistic.
Secondly, it does absolutely nothing to improve diversity in the workforce. Only five years ago, companies were falling over themselves to flaunt their DEI credentials and recount to all who would listen about how they were going to reform their hiring practices to make them more equitable. One labor market contraction later and those ironclad commitments seem to have faded into air, with employers collectively reverting to the “it’s not what you know, but who you know” system. For firms who still stand by their commitments to hiring diversity, this will by definition involve bringing candidates into the process who do not have existing professional connections. If the only people who can secure a role are those who already know the right people in their chosen industry, then the demographics of said industry will stay the same as they always have, and new talent will be locked out for reasons which are completely unrelated to their ability to do the job.
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Even worse are the jobs which are filled via professional networks before ever being advertised to the public. The job market shouldn’t function like a regional fast food chain, where you need to order off the secret menu in order to get anything decent to eat. This is serious business, with people’s careers, livelihoods, and access to the material necessities of life at stake. It’s easier than ever to put a job listing online where people can see it and apply, so can we please leave the old boys’ networks in the past where they belong?
Cold outreach
Regarding how easy it is to post jobs online nowadays, many recruiters will say, “That’s the exact problem! It’s easier than ever for people to apply online, and we’re overwhelmed with the volume of applications we receive. That’s why reaching out to someone at your target employer is so important, to help you stand out from the crowd.”
Here we arrive at the crux of the issue: the valorization of networking is making a resurgence in order to prop up a broken hiring system. The LinkedIn influencers pushing networking as the miracle cure to unemployment must surely know that a hiring system based on connections rather than capability advantages those who are already well connected through their high-flying professional and social circles. They know that “just know the right people!” is not actionable career advice for most people. But in order to sell their services as career coaches or LinkedIn Premium salespeople, or simply to assuage their guilt at their own good fortune, they have to push the idea that networking is just another skill that anyone can learn. Email enough hiring managers and you too can win the prize of being allowed to work for a living! By combining three very different concepts into the one term “networking”, they make it seem as if messaging strangers on LinkedIn can gain you the same advantage as being related to the CEO.
We are told that sending “cold job applications” (which back in my day were simply known as “job applications”) simply doesn’t cut it in the current hiring market. You need to be emailing and direct messaging hiring managers to flag your application, and connect with current employees to ask for referrals or virtual coffee chats. Otherwise, your application is going to get lost in the pile of hundreds of other applications.
To the assertion that candidates need to contact hiring managers directly to let them know they have submitted an application, I say: that’s what the application is for. The very submission of the application is a communicative act which lets the employer know you have submitted an application. An additional message to let them know you’ve applied and highlight your suitability for the role (which is already contained in the application itself) is completely redundant, and only serves to further clog up the recruiter’s inbox — making it more likely that applications will get lost in the pile, not less. So let’s be honest about what the true purpose of this outreach is: attempting to gain an unfair advantage by circumventing the normal application process.
On any online job posting you will find a set of instructions detailing how the employer would like applications to be submitted. They all invariably ask for some combination of resume, cover letter, references, and work samples — often to be manually typed into a clunky and barely functional ATS after failing to parse the documents you’ve uploaded. At no point have any that I’ve seen instructed candidates to send follow-up messages to the hiring manager. If recruiters require applications to be submitted a certain way, they have a moral duty to the candidates who follow their instructions to consider their applications systematically and fairly — not to prioritize those who try to bypass the application process altogether. The only things which should move a candidate to the top of the pile are their skills and experience, not the fact that they managed to track you down on LinkedIn.
Job applications are a bureaucratic process, and like any bureaucratic process they are frustratingly impersonal; but the fairness of such processes lies in their very impersonality. Waiting in line at the DMV is no-one’s idea of fun, but the only thing less fun than waiting in line at the DMV is doing so while watching a series of people file past you to try to grab the clerk’s attention, saying that their problem is far more important than anyone else’s and they are actually very short on time, so could they please just go next? The responsibility of a good clerk in this situation is to tell them to get to the back of the queue, not praise them for their initiative and wave them ahead. Hiring managers, please take note.
As for referrals and the notorious “virtual coffee chat”, referrals have genuine value when the person doing the referring has genuine experience of working alongside you and can speak to the quality of your work. The same does not apply to those garnered from strangers on LinkedIn, who can at best attest to your ability to string a few sentences together. The fact that they still seem to work in applicants’ favor is equal parts baffling and infuriating.
The ostensible value of the coffee chat is to have an initial conversation with someone at the company in order to learn more about the role and demonstrate that you’re a somewhat competent human being. However, there are entire departments full of salaried professionals whose job it is to sift through applicants and have initial conversations during which candidates can find out more about the role: they work in HR and recruitment. The increasing reliance on referrals and virtual coffee chats seems to me to be a naked attempt to shift some of this workload onto employees in other departments — who find their inboxes flooded with eager applicants begging to fill up their calendars in 15-minute increments in search of an arbitrary advantage — and it would be in their interests to push back against this trend.
To this, I’ve seen recruiters attest that the automated systems they use to filter applications frequently overlook qualified candidates who end up being excellent hires, which shows the importance of connecting with someone first to ensure that your application gets seen by a human. To which I say: if you acknowledge that your automated system is broken, then it is your responsibility to fix it, not the candidate’s to find a workaround. If you acknowledge that being reviewed by a human is the only way applications can be properly assessed, then maybe stop using the automated system altogether?
While the potential advantage offered by cold outreach may look attractive to individual jobseekers, it is in our collective interest to resist it. As more and more people adopt it as a job-hunting strategy, those emails and direct messages will stop making you stand out and become just another pile, hundreds deep, for your application to get lost in. Candidates will be forced to step it up again and again in a Red Queen’s race of ever more unpaid labor while the paid professionals in HR leave their hiring systems resolutely broken.
Conclusion
Job applications suck. They suck to write, and they suck to review. I imagine they suck to review even more in the age of the AI-generated resume and cover letter. It’s tempting to think that there must be a way to bypass the application stage altogether. I believe that one day the recruitment industry will conduct some long overdue innovation and come up with a method of filtering candidates which is fair, efficient, and objective. But right now, the humble job application is the fairest method we have.
Job applications are far from perfect, especially given the widespread adoption of ATS technologies which are known to perpetuate, rather than reduce, patterns of bias and discrimination. The answer to that is to adjust your application process in ways which reduce bias (e.g. removing names, ages, and educational institutions from resumes, manual review of applications by multiple people) — not to open the Pandora’s Box of bias and discrimination which is networking.
Reducing the saliency of job applications in favor of networking is a fundamentally unjust way of handling recruitment which advantages those who are best connected, not who are most capable. It is a system which breeds cronyism, compounds existing inequalities, and locks out capable candidates for arbitrary reasons. The old adage of “it’s not what you know, but who you know” was a cynical description of a deeply nepotistic world, not a blueprint for a functional hiring market.
To all the hiring managers out there, I have one request: please abide by the hiring processes you set up. If you ask for a resume and cover letter in your job ad, then base your assessments on those materials and those materials alone. Treat applications systematically and fairly; don’t allow people to jump the queue just because they sent you a LinkedIn DM or happen to know one of your employees.
And to the LinkedIn influencers who glorify networking as a job-hunting strategy by presenting it as inevitable or even desirable, please stop. If even a small part of you cares about making the hiring market fairer and more meritocratic, then please use your platform to call on the recruitment industry to do better. We don’t need to see any more anecdotes about the time you snagged an interview because you went to the same university as the hiring manager. We need to see a public conversation around hiring which places the responsibility to change on those who hold power over the system, not those who are victimized by it.
