How to Gracefully Decline a Networking Request
Deborah Grayson Riegel and Loren Margolis for Harvard Business Review
You recently landed your first job out of college and are just two weeks into the role when you receive your first networking request. A former classmate has spotted an opening at your organization and sends you a message on LinkedIn. He wants to know:
- Are you available to hop on a quick call?
- Is the company still hiring for that position?
- Would you be able to refer him to the hiring manager?
- Can you suggest any other contacts he can reach out to?
While you consider yourself a personally friendly and professionally generous person, you feel hesitant to respond to this request. Firstly, you’re not familiar with his work. Secondly, you’ve never spoken to him before this moment. Thirdly, you’re still building your reputation and don’t want to make a potentially bad recommendation.
What should you do?
As executive coaches and leadership consultants, we often find ourselves in this situation — fielding networking requests from people whom we know little about but who want to break into our industry or to be introduced to our colleagues and clients. While we certainly value the upsides of networking, over the years, we’ve learned there is equal value in protecting our time and the relationships we’ve worked hard to build.
That’s why our advice to you is: Follow your gut when deciding whether to accept a networking request. There are times when it’s to your benefit to respectfully decline an invitation — and the scenario described above is one of them.
You former classmate has overstepped a golden rule of networking: Ask not what your network can do for you, but what you can do for your network. His request is premature and comes across as self-serving. How will you know if he’s a good fit for the role when you don’t know anything about the quality of his work? Why would you risk your relationships with colleagues by introducing them to someone for whom you can’t vouch? You could end up damaging your credibility.
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