The 2 Things You Must Do In Every Job Search

During a passive or active job search people often approach their network the wrong way.

We're all familiar with the classic distinction between strong ties and weak ties. Strong ties are your closest friends and weak ties are your acquaintances. Most of us when we need help go to strong ties because its comfortable to reach out. Often times weak ties are more helpful than strong ties because strong ties have redundant information. Strong ties know all the same people and information as you. But acquaintances can open up new information within different circles of friends. There's evidence that supports that you're 58% more likely to get a job from a weak tie than a strong tie.

The other way to improve your chances of finding a new job is make your network powerful by reaching out to a dormant tie. These are the people you used to know in the last 3 to 5 years (past colleague, former college roommate, etc.) The dormant ties have been meeting different people and learning new things over the past few years that will help open up new opportunities, plus its more comfortable to reach out to these ties because you have that shared experience or common history. And its certainly a lot easier to reconnect than starting a new connection from scratch.

Bottom line, most of us could do a better job of reaching out to those weak and dormant ties during the job search. 

Insight taken from the best selling book "Give and Take" by Adam Grant. A must read for every business professional.