Weak Ties and LinkedIn

I recently came across the concept of weak ties - and it has totally reframed my view of “networking”.

We usually think to look to our “strong ties”, close friends and family, while making the job transition - asking them first for advice and available job openings. However, in reality, we should be paying attention to our weak ties (acquaintances and colleagues who we have communicated with rarely).

A weak tie is someone we have only met briefly, maybe one time at a dinner party or someone who we used to go to school with - someone who we know of, but don’t have any deep meaningful connection built up yet.

The reason our weak ties help us more than our strong ties, is that our strong ties (friends, and family) are probably pretty similar to ourselves in socioeconomic status, interests, beliefs, and career choices. Our strong ties are also more likely much quicker to offer us compassion and sympathy, when the cold reason of logic might be better suited. As a result, our “strong” ties can even hold us back as we search for new opportunity. By contrast, our weak ties are likely more diverse in interests and experience - traits which make them far more valuable from a networking perspective.

It’s important to note that “weak” tie does not mean random. An arbitrary connection on LinkedIn is not a weak tie, a connection is only as valuable as your ability to use it. Random connections with people are anything but detrimental, inflating your sense of safety when in reality you have about the same chance of reaching that connection as simply cold-emailing. For a LinkedIn connection to be fruitful, it must satisfy the weak tie test. You should be able to find some common ground between both of you, preferably some face to face interaction in the past.

Pruning your connections, and taking stock of your weak ties is a very high measure action. I’ve found that my success cold-emailing professionals is somewhere in the sub 5% response area, but my success trying to get in touch with my weak ties is upwards of 50%! This is huge, especially from a networking standpoint. For me, the lesson was clear, stop trying to make random connections and focus on developing a larger group of weak ties.