Will your network actually get you hired? The five signals that decide.

Everybody tells you to work your network. Nobody tells you how to know if your network is worth working. It comes down to five things: Decision-Maker Access, Relationship Recency, Industry Coverage, Level Match, and Advocacy. You can check every one of them yourself, today, and I'll show you how.

First, why this matters more than your resume right now. Hiring runs on trust before it runs on applications. Internal candidates get read first, referred candidates get read next, and a referred candidate converts at roughly 10 times the rate of a cold applicant. That's industry data across 1.2 million hires, and it matches what I watched for 25 years running talent acquisition inside the Fortune 500. So the question is not whether you have a network. Almost everyone with a career has one. The question is whether yours has these five things.

1. Decision-Maker Access. Do you know people who are in the room when hiring gets decided, or near it? Not celebrities, not influencers. Managers, directors, and the people they trust. To check: scan your connections at your target companies and count how many are at or above the level that would hire you. Eight hundred connections and none who could walk your name into a hiring conversation is a big audience that can't help you.

2. Relationship Recency. A warm relationship from 2019 is not warm anymore, and this is the signal people most overestimate. To check: look at your last twenty real exchanges, actual conversations, not likes. How many happened in the past six months? How many of the people who matter most to your search would say "oh, we're in touch"? Relationships cool quietly. Nobody sends you a notification when you slip off someone's radar.

3. Industry Coverage. Does your network actually reach into the industry and companies where you want to land? Careers drift, and networks lag behind them. Fifteen years in one industry usually means deep coverage of the place you're leaving and almost none of the place you're going. To check: list your ten target companies, then count your first-degree connections inside each. The zeros aren't failures. They tell you where to build.

4. Level Match. Are you connected at the right seniority for the role you want next? A network full of peers from ten years ago may sit two levels below where you're headed. To check: for your target level, count connections one level above it, at it, and one below. You want all three, because the level above hires you, your level vouches for you, and the level below tells you what the team is really like.

5. Advocacy. When your name comes up in a room you're not in, does anyone speak? This is what separates being known from being backed. To check: count the people who have recommended you, referred you, or introduced you to someone in the last two years. Then the harder question: whose names did you expect on that list that aren't there? That gap usually isn't about how good you are. It's about how recently you made it easy for them.

Score yourself honestly on all five and you'll see why applying harder hasn't been working. Most people who feel stuck aren't weak on all five. They're strong on two or three and blind on the rest, and the blind ones are deciding their outcomes.

One more thing the cold-calling years taught me: inside every company there's a connector, the person who knows who runs what and who's worth talking to. Your network has them too, and they're rarely the most senior people in it. When you work through these five signals, watch for the people who keep showing up as the ones who know everyone. They're how you reach the second and third degree connections sitting inside your target companies.

You can do this whole assessment by hand. It takes an afternoon and a spreadsheet, and if that's your speed, you now have the method. Your Network Read does it automatically: it reads your actual LinkedIn connection data, scores all five signals into a Network Readiness Score out of 100, and then does the part a spreadsheet can't. It names the specific people to reach out to first, why them, and exactly what to say so it doesn't feel weird, in words that sound like you, not a script. One report, $95, no subscription.

Either way, start with signal two. Recency is the one you can change this week, and one honest reconnect will teach you more about your network than any score. Who's the first person you'd send it to?