Daily Endeavor Blog

While we’re hard at work making descriptions and insights available for 100,000 types of jobs so you can learn about them without first needing to know 100,000 people…when it comes to identifying actual job opportunities, there’s still no substitute for the people you know.

Contrary to job board claims, the simple fact is most job opportunities travel through word of mouth, which means they travel along professional and personal relationships. Your social networks determine more than anything else whether you’ll hear about an opportunity.

This week Paul Butler, an intern on Facebook’s data infrastructure engineering team, posted a graph that shows the ties that bind. It’s a data visualization of the friendship relationships between cities. Paul photographed a sampling of our social networks. Righteous.

Why should we care?

Paul’s infographic reminds us of a few things. Opportunities are everywhere, and fortunately it’s as easy as ever to make and maintain relationships everywhere. Weak ties improve your reach. Strong ties improve your references.

Internships don’t have to suck. In fact there are real benefits. Internships are opportunities to show what you can do, to build something or help solve a need. They’re a way for you to try a company out (people, culture, types of work) and a way for a company to try you out. Even though “internship” has a connotation of unpaid and entry-level, it pays to think more broadly about them as lightweight, short-term contract roles for any age and any stage. Perhaps it’s time for a new term.

To learn we need experience and the data from it. Paul not only built something based on skills he had, he built something discoverable which has led to a lot of feedback — data points he can use. Right on Paul.