LinkedIn & the 6 (or less) Degrees of Separation

Those in the business world may be familiar with LinkedIn, a networking site that allows “business” people to connect for the purpose of doing business together, trading stories of consultants, and finding employment (me, at the moment I am writing this). The information I have been finding in my quest to find work is telling me that LinkedIn is one of the primary methods for networking and uncovering the “secret” job market, those positions that are never posted, and apparently get filled just via this referral network.

As I listened to a recent webinar about using LinkedIn in this manner, many of the participants were unfamiliar with the service. The instructor took some time to explain that it is in the vein of social networking sites, like Facebook and MySpace, but has managed to stay rather serious. As I listened to her discussion of how large some people’s individual networks were, IT HIT ME!!! Let’s pull out the six degrees of separation theory!!!

I will not take space here to explain to those who are totally clueless, but do provide the ubiquitous Wikipedia link for you: CLICK HERE

I realized that I needed to expand my network in a big way!!! Here’s why…

I was sitting there with about 35 connections, since I saw no reason to actively pursue additional people to my network. Well, if one of my connections had 200 connections, and one of those had 200 different connections, I was sitting two steps away from 40,000 people who might know of a job opening that I could fit nicely into!!! Add another layer of 200, and BINGO!, I’m up to 8 million possibilities!!! I don’t even need another 200 connection layer before I, theoretically, have connected myself to EVERYONE on LinkedIn!!! AWESOME!!!! And I have one direct connection with over 400 connections, and another with over 500!!!! This is like taking candy from a baby!!!!

Wait, reality is setting in… I would need a few of those connections to really sell me to the next layer, and they need to do the same, for ME, and so on and so on… And we are in a major recession… Well, maybe the candy hugging baby is a big one!!!

In summary, I imported my email address list, and I am now at 77 connections!!! Which gives me twice the bandwidth on LinkedIn that I had before? Or is that 4 times the bandwidth? Or 8 times???

I’ll let you know how the job networking works out.

Until Next Time!
Julius