This is good advice and I need to start taking it. I am one of those rare people who could get hired on skill alone. It's not working anymore, leaving me stuck in a dead-end position.
I think the reduction in that working is because of an over-saturation of people who play buzzword bingo on their resume, LinkedIn, whatever to the point that it's impossible for a hiring manager to really discern who actually has a broad set of skills vs who is just trying to jam noise in the signal.
That's probably where social connections come in because it at least provides a verification layer of "yeah X actually does know how to do A, B, and C we should get them into the hiring pipeline"
That's probably where social connections come in because it at least provides a verification layer of "yeah X actually does know how to do A, B, and C we should get them into the hiring pipeline"