Network Blindness
The inability of recruiting firms to see the full scope of their collective network — especially second-degree connections of happy placements and clients.
What is Network Blindness?
Network Blindness is one of the Three Blindnesses in recruiting — the inability to see the full scope of a firm's collective network. The average recruiter has 2,000+ LinkedIn connections but actively uses 50-100. Across an entire firm, thousands of relationships sit siloed in individual heads, invisible to everyone else. The most valuable layer — who your happy placements and clients actually know — is almost entirely hidden.
Why It Matters
Joe Myers, CEO of a $100M+ IT staffing firm, identified Network Blindness as the "number one or number two reason why so many staffing companies can't scale beyond $20 million." Recruiters hoard relationships — not maliciously, but because sharing them has never been rewarded or even made possible.
When a CFO leaves Minneapolis for Denver, the Minneapolis team stops caring and the Denver team doesn't know he existed. A competitor gets the placement.
The Science
This isn't intuition. Rajkumar et al. (2022) studied 20 million LinkedIn users and 2 billion new ties over five years, published in Science. Their finding: moderately weak ties — the kind of second-degree connections most firms can't see — create the most job mobility.
Granovetter's landmark 1973 study found the same thing: 83% of people who found jobs through contacts used acquaintances, not close friends. The network layer that matters most is the one recruiters can't access.
The Cost
Dave Rust, former CFO at Salo (sold to Korn Ferry at $150M), described their top business developer making $800K/year. She spent 90% of her time on calls and meetings that went nowhere — not because she was bad at her job, but because she couldn't see her own network. She succeeded through sheer volume of activity, compensating with effort for what should have been solved with data.
How WarmPath Solves It
WarmPath maps the collective network across an entire firm — every recruiter's connections, every placed candidate's network, every client's sphere of influence. When a connection matches an intent signal, the system surfaces it with a specific ask and a one-click intro workflow.
Frequently Asked Questions
Network Blindness is the inability of recruiting firms to see the full scope of their collective network. The average recruiter has 2,000+ LinkedIn connections but actively uses 50-100. The second-degree connections of happy placements — the most valuable lead source — are almost entirely invisible.