...there are plenty of situations that will render your social network useless, for example most of your network might be academics and you might have decided to leave academia. Most of your network might be in companies doing onsite-only in a geographical area you've moved away from. Most of your network might be less-well-paid than you. (So: the jobs you would want to apply for are with hiring managers that your friends don't know and have no influence over and if they did, they would use the opportunity for themselves rather than someone else). -- In my experience, networking just doesn't work as well as business school ideology would have you believe it does for various reasons that I'm going to try to sum up by quoting a Groucho Marx joke: "I'd never join a club that would have someone like me for a member."