Find Your Next Role in 3 Simple (But Not Easy) Steps
Netwarming Team · Thursday, October 22, 2026
Finding the right people takes an afternoon. Finding who can introduce you takes one more filter. The hard part is the third step, and it is hard for a reason that has nothing to do with how hard it is.
Three steps, none of them complicated. It still takes most people months, because the difficulty was never in knowing what to do.
1. Find the right people
The world got smaller and most job searches have not noticed. Working out who already works at the company you want to work for is no longer detective work. It takes about five minutes.
Open LinkedIn and search people, not jobs. Then filter: current company, industry, job title, location. You are not looking for a recruiter, and you are not looking for the hiring manager yet. You are building a list of humans who already do the work you want to do, at the places you want to do it.
Twenty names is plenty. Ten is enough to start.
The reason to search this way is that a job opening and a job are different things. An opening exists for a few weeks, takes hundreds of applications and disappears. A job is a kind of work that several hundred people within driving distance are already doing. The second list does not expire, and it is the one worth building.
2. Find the people who know those people
Same search. One more filter: 2nd degree connections.
A 2nd degree connection is somebody you do not know who knows somebody you do, and LinkedIn will name the person you have in common. That shared contact is the entire mechanism. They are the door, and you already have their number.
Run this across your twenty names and a pattern usually appears. One or two people in your own network turn out to sit next to a surprising share of the list — the former colleague who has worked at three of the five companies on it, the person from a chamber breakfast who seems to know everybody in the industry. Start there.
If nothing comes back as 2nd degree, that is information rather than failure. It means your network and your target industry do not overlap yet, which is the third step's problem and has an answer further down.
3. Ask for the intro
This is the simple step and the hard one, and it is where nearly everybody stops.
What makes an ask easy to refuse is leaving work on the other person's desk. Three rules fix most of it.
Ask the person you actually know. The request goes to your 1st degree contact, and they decide whether to pass it on. Going straight to the 2nd degree stranger throws away the only advantage you had.
Name the person and the reason. "Do you know anyone hiring?" makes them do the thinking. "I noticed you are connected to Dana at Acme — I am trying to move into operations and would like to hear how she found it" has already done the thinking for them.
Write the paragraph they can forward. Two or three sentences they can paste into a message without editing: who you are, what you are after, why this person. Anyone who has ever made an introduction will tell you that the forwardable paragraph is the difference between "sure" and "sure, remind me next week".
And ask for a conversation rather than a job. Nobody can hand you a job. Plenty of people can spare twenty minutes, and twenty minutes is how you hear about the role three weeks before it is posted.
Why the detour works
Going around the application form can feel like a trick. It is not. It is the ordinary way most people hear about most work, and it has been measured twice.
Mark Granovetter's 1973 paper found that people hear about new opportunities more often from acquaintances than from close friends, for a reason that sounds backwards until you sit with it: your close friends know what you know. They move through the same rooms and read the same news. An acquaintance is standing somewhere else, which is the only way they can tell you something you had not already heard.
That sat as a correlation for nearly fifty years. In 2022 a study in Science tested it experimentally, using randomised data from more than 20 million LinkedIn members over five years, and found the same effect — with the refinement that the most useful contacts are the moderately weak ones rather than the weakest available.
Step two is that paper turned into a filter. A 2nd degree connection is close to exactly what Granovetter meant by a weak tie.
If your network cannot open the door
Sometimes steps one and two produce nothing: no route into the industry you want, or none to anybody who would recognise your name. That is a real outcome, and the answer to it is unglamorous and effective. Go where those people already are.
Professional associations are the obvious place, because that is who turns up: the bar association chapter, the realtor board, the industry society. On Netwarming they are filed under Industry, the largest of the four categories we list, and their events keep office hours — mostly Tuesday to Thursday, with a strong lunchtime showing, because attending one is the sort of thing an employer tends to count as part of the job.
A room is a slower instrument than a 2nd degree connection. It also compounds. Six months of one industry lunch a month leaves you with a network in the field you are moving towards rather than the one you are leaving.
The honest part
The steps are simple. Doing them is not, and it is worth being precise about which bit is hard.
It is not the searching. Steps one and two are an afternoon, and you can do them badly and still finish with a list worth having.
It is the third one, every time. Asking a near-stranger to spend a little social capital on you feels like an imposition, so the message gets drafted and not sent, and the search quietly reverts to the job board — which feels like progress because there is a button to press. Applying is not easier than asking. It is only less exposed.
The compensation is that the people being asked mind far less than you expect. Most of them have stood where you are standing, and the ones who have not are usually flattered to be treated as someone who knows people.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I find people who work at a company I want to join?
Search people rather than jobs on LinkedIn, then filter by current company, industry, title and location. You are building a list of people who already do the work you want, not chasing a specific opening. Ten to twenty names is enough to start.
What is a 2nd degree connection on LinkedIn?
Somebody you are not connected to who is connected to one of your own contacts. LinkedIn shows you the person you have in common, and that shared contact is who you ask for the introduction.
How do I ask for an introduction without it being awkward?
Ask the person you actually know rather than the stranger, name the specific person and your reason for wanting to talk to them, and include two or three sentences they can forward without editing. Ask for a conversation, not a job.
What if nobody in my network knows anyone in my target industry?
Then the gap is the thing to work on. Professional associations are where that industry already gathers, and they are the largest category of events listed on Netwarming. One event a month for six months builds the overlap your search is currently missing.
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