In reading The Start-up of You by Reid Hoffman and Ben
Casnocha I noted their misunderstanding of how linking and separation in human
networks operate. This shocked me since Hoffman is a cofounder of Linkedin, an
online business-networking site!
What did they miss?
In the book, they describes why two or three degrees of
separation and not 6 is the critical number since there is only one person
between you as the initiator and your target. That is, you know the person you
would like to talk to or at most you know someone who both knows you and the
person you’d like to meet.
Perhaps target is a poor choice of label but in any
communication you have one party sending information and another receiving. The
receiver is what I am labeling a target. The authors contention is that two to
three people is the most effective linking since either you or your target are
known to each other or to the person in the middle.
The fallacy is that the model the authors used in their book
is that it presumes a cooperative system. In a cooperative system both the
initiator and the target are actively attempting to achieve and maintain
communication. When you are trying to gain an introduction to someone you have
never personally met you are in a non-cooperative system. A non-cooperative
system is one in which the target is rejecting connections. If the target was
actively seeking connections, you would not need any intermediate steps to
connect, you could just contact them directly. Their contact information, email
and phone numbers would be readily available to the public at large.
The fact that the email address is not readily available and
there are one or more buffers blocking telephone calls and face-to-face
meetings is a clear indication of a non-cooperative system. Where you are
introduced by a mutual connection (no matter the number of degrees of separation)
the target is using your mutual connections as that buffer or filter to help
limit the interruption caused by unsolicited contacts.
Even people who attend some function expressly for the
purpose of networking and meeting new people use the limited attendance of the
function as a buffer to limit the number of contacts. Not because they are
rejecting any specific contact but to keep from being overwhelmed by an unlimited
number of new connections.
When you attempt to make your target a new node in your
network, that person must first be open to a new connection. When you are
trying to get noticed by a hiring manager, while they are actively looking for
someone to fill the opening, that hiring manager is trying to limit or filter
the applications to reduce their workload in screening for the eventual new
employee.
The true value of an introduction is that the person making
the introduction is a “trusted source” who your target has already accepted into
their communications chain and the hope is that you can by-pass the other filters
the hiring manger has in place that would normally reject your attempt to
communicate.
The problem, of course, is that your direct contact is
spending their credibility with their direct contact, the one you are asking
for an introduction to. While introducing a friend at a social event is low
risk – if the introduced pair don’t hit it off there is little risk of you losing
either friend – introducing a prospective employee is high risk!
If the friend you recommended is not a good candidate,
the person you introduced them to might limit your contact in the future and
you don’t want to loose or damage you own ability to call on your friend in the
future.
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