Where To Start A Job Search

Whether you’re looking for a change of work, or you had that change forced upon you by a layoff or firing, looking for a new job is a big endeavor. A job search is a job in and of itself. But unfortunately, it’s a job that a lot of people start in the wrong place.

When it’s time to find a new position, most people start in one of two places. Some start with close friends, family members, and maybe even colleagues they worked closely with. Sometimes, they start with a close circle of friends because those friends provide the social support they need to encourage and motivate them during the search. But if you’re looking for leads on new opportunities, close contacts are a poor place to start. Network science explains why with a phenomenon known as transitivity — a fancy term for the likelihood that two people who share a mutual connection are connected to each other. Networks and relationships tend to cluster, they move towards each other and over time, many people in that cluster think alike and are aware of the same opportunities of which close friends were aware. And all of them are likely aware of the same opportunities of which you were already aware.

Other job searchers start with the anonymity of the internet — maybe it’s to avoid the difficult conversations that telling our friends and connections involves. Or maybe it is to try and access a greater diversity of…