“When considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rain forest, a friend of your friend knows a friend of their friend.”
I’ve blogged, pleaded, begged, and implored the virtues of word-of-mouth job-search. Here are the new stats from The New York Times:
- Six Degrees of Separation Exists No MORE!
- It’s 4.37 degrees of separation in the U. S. More than half of the people in the U.S. older than 13 ARE on Facebook.
- It’s 4.74 degrees of separation internationally.
Even when it was six degrees, in job-search, important hiring manager contact consistently happened in two-three degrees of separation.
The bottom line- Why?
- For employers, word-of-mouth job-search is a financial windfall, i.e. no headhunter fees, advertising, handling floods of résumés, etc.
- For candidates, word-of-mouth job-search gets your foot in the door quietly and professionally even when there is no apparent vacancy. You can create a job or, at least, be there when the vacancy occurs.
Only eight job-search techniques exist, word-of-mouth job-search exponentially produces more of the work you want than the other seven techniques combined.
