Who Would Vouch for You Right Now?
Hello Friends,
Happy Monday and welcome to September.
This month we are exploring something that most career conversations skip entirely, even though it quietly determines more about where a career goes than almost anything else we spend time developing.
We are calling this month's theme The Other CV.
You have a CV that documents your qualifications, your roles, and your achievements. Most of us have spent years curating it, refining it, making sure it tells a coherent story of professional growth. That CV opens certain doors. But there is another one, one that most professionals have never consciously built, and it is the one that tends to open the doors that matter most.
The other CV is your relationship portfolio.
Who knows your name?
Who would speak for you in a room you are not in?
Who, when an opportunity arises, thinks of you first?
Here is the question worth sitting with as we begin September:
If someone you respected were asked right now to name three people they would vouch for professionally, would your name come up? And if so, whose list are you on?
What the Research Has Been Telling Us
A widely cited study by LinkedIn found that approximately 85 percent of jobs are filled through networking rather than through open applications. That number has been referenced so often it risks feeling like background noise. But the implication of it is worth pausing on. If 85 percent of opportunities move through relationships rather than through applications, then the effort most professionals invest in polishing their CV and perfecting their cover letter is addressing roughly 15 percent of the actual opportunity landscape.
Herminia Ibarra, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School and one of the leading researchers on professional networks and career transitions, describes what she calls network capital: the stock of relationships, contacts, and social connections that give professionals access to information, opportunities, and influence. Her research, published across two decades of work, shows consistently that the people who navigate career transitions most successfully are not always the most qualified candidates. They are the people with the most useful and diverse network capital.
This is not an argument against skills. Skills are the foundation and they are not negotiable. But in a professional landscape where many candidates have comparable qualifications, the relationship portfolio is often what determines which of them gets the call.
The Three Types of People You Need on Your Side
Not all relationships function the same way in a professional context. Sociologist Mark Granovetter's groundbreaking research on the strength of weak ties found that the most valuable professional connections are often not our closest friends but our more distant acquaintances: people in different industries, organisations, or circles who can connect us to opportunities and information we would never encounter within our immediate network.
Source: Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360-1380.
In practical terms, your relationship portfolio needs three types of people to be genuinely useful.
Advocates: people who know your work well enough and trust it deeply enough to recommend you without being asked. These tend to be former managers, colleagues who have worked closely with you, or mentors who have watched you operate over time. They are the ones who put your name in rooms you are not in.
Connectors: people with broad and diverse networks who can introduce you to people you would not otherwise reach. They may not know your work in depth, but they know enough about who you are and where you are headed to make a useful introduction when the opportunity presents itself.
Peers in your field: people at a similar stage of their career, across different organisations and sectors, who share information, refer work to each other, and create the kind of horizontal network that can be as valuable as vertical mentorship over a long career.
Skills and Connections Are Not Competing Priorities
It is important to name this directly, because the framing of skills versus connections can create a false tension. The most well-connected person with nothing to deliver will not sustain a professional reputation. And the most skilled person operating in complete isolation will be bypassed by less skilled but better connected peers time and again.
The question is not which one matters more. The question is which one most professionals systematically underinvest in, and the answer, consistently, is relationships. We are taught from an early age that effort and qualification are the primary currencies of professional life. Nobody teaches us to tend to our networks with the same deliberateness we bring to developing our technical skills.
This month we are going to address that gap.
Over the next four weeks, we will look at what genuine relationship-building looks like for different types of people, how to approach mentorship in a way that actually works, and how to begin accessing the rooms and opportunities that currently feel out of reach.
To start, one practical question for this week: who are the three people currently on your advocates list? If you cannot name them with confidence, that is the most important piece of information you have about where to focus your energy this month.
Drop your thoughts in the comments. And as always, we want to hear from you.
Fiyin
Team Konseye
With The Right Network Anything Is Possible.®
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