Most Opportunities Come From People You Barely Know

Tracy Brower made a point in Forbes recently that runs against everything students assume about networking. Most new opportunities don’t come from your close friends. They come from weak ties: acquaintances, friends of friends, the second and third layer out.

The logic is almost obvious once somebody says it. Your closest people know what you know. They move in your circles, hear the same news, see the same openings. Weak ties live somewhere else entirely, which means they know about jobs you’ve never heard of.

That’s genuinely good news for a college student, because weak ties happen to be the one thing a twenty-year-old has in abundance and throws away without noticing.

The kid from your freshman seminar. The manager from your summer job. Your roommate’s older brother. The person you sat next to at a conference once. Every one of those is a weak tie, and almost every student lets all of them go cold by junior year.

Brower’s practical advice is refreshingly low effort. Staying visible on social media, liking and commenting on somebody’s posts, is enough to keep a weak tie warm. When you start a search, tell your weak ties you’re looking and ask for information rather than a job. When you apply somewhere, look for a connection who can introduce you or tell you something about the interviewer.

For parents, the version worth passing along is this. The goal isn’t a hundred close friends. It’s two hundred people who would recognize your student’s name and take a fifteen-minute call.

That takes about ten minutes a week and four years of not letting people disappear.