Scott Galloway's advice to young people is uncomfortable, and the hiring data backs him up.
According to Galloway, Google posts a job and 200 CVs arrive within about eight minutes. A machine, or someone very tired, trims that to the 20 most qualified. At that point everyone left in the pile is, on paper, good enough. So how does the company actually choose?
On a recent appearance on Vice News, NYU professor Scott Galloway gave the unsentimental answer. About 70% of the time, he said, the person they pick is the one with an internal advocate. Not the most qualified of the qualified. The one somebody inside the building was willing to speak up for. His advice to young people followed from it, and it was blunt: be as social as possible.
This is the part that stings, especially for anyone who was told that grades and a clean CV were the whole game. Once you are onthe shortlist, your qualifications have largely done their job. They got you through the filter. They do not get you the offer. What gets you the offer is someone in the room saying your name when you are not there to say it yourself.
Galloway's framing is worth sitting with: you want to be placed in rooms of opportunity when you are not physically present. That only happens if someone in that room knows you, likes you, and is willing to attach their own credibility to yours. You cannot manufacture that in the week you start job hunting. It is built quietly, long before, through a hundred small interactions that had nothing to do with a job.
If this sounds like soft motivational talk, the hiring numbers are stubbornly concrete. One analysis of more than 15,000 applications found that referrals made up only about 6% of applications but accounted for around 37% of hires. A referral is the single strongest signal a candidate can carry, because it transfers trust that the company already has in its own people onto someone it has never met.
Notice what that means in practice. The referred candidate did not necessarily interview better or look better on paper. They arrived already vouched for. Someone inside had already spent a little social capital on them before they walked through the door. That is the advocate Galloway is talking about, and it is the difference between being one of 20 and being the one.
Galloway reaches for an unlikely comparison to make the point land: high school. The most successful people there, he argues, were not the best looking or the best athletes. They were the ones who liked other people the most. The kid who said, "Great game, Brett, or way to go, Lisa”, and meant it. The person who showed the most goodwill became the most popular, and it was not a coincidence.
The mechanism does not change when you grow up, it just raises the stakes. Goodwill compounds. Every time you help someone, speak well of them when they are not around, or simply show up consistently and pleasantly, you are making a tiny deposit. Years later, those deposits are what someone draws on when your name comes up in a room you will never enter. The people who treat this as beneath them are the same people who later wonder why the job went to someone less qualified.
The cruel timing of all this is that the moment you most need an advocate is the worst moment to start looking for one. A network assembled in a panic reads as exactly what it is. The relationships that actually speak for you are the ones you built when you wanted nothing, watered slowly, and stayed in touch with long after the reason you met had faded.
Which is really a discipline, not a talent. Meet people, follow up while they still remember you, and then, the part almost everyone skips, stay in touch when there is nothing to gain.
Galloway's advice can sound cynical, as though work is just popularity with a salary. It is gentler than that. Being social, in his sense, is mostly just being generous to people early and often, with no scoreboard in mind. Do that for years, and the rooms you never enter start working in your favor. Start now, while you do not need anything from anyone.