Networking is an effective way to facilitate personal development and career success and is especially relevant during the job search process. However, its potential benefits are often not realized because people are reluctant to reach out to would-be advice givers. To overcome this reluctance, prior research has emphasized self-oriented benefits of reaching out—such as receiving valuable advice and job leads—to motivate people to initiate more informational interviews and other networking behavior. We challenge this self-oriented perspective on networking, suggesting that one obstacle to networking is that people are often anxious about being a burden on others. Thus, we designed an intervention to reframe networking in a way that is other-oriented, emphasizing how it can benefit the advice givers, such as making them feel helpful or important or giving them a fresh perspective. We hypothesized that an other-oriented (compared to a self-oriented) networking intervention would increase networking intentions (Study 1) and networking behavior (Study 2) by advice seekers and that this effect would be mediated by a reduction in burden anxiety (Study 3). We find consistent support for our hypotheses in three studies of job seekers: an online experiment, a field experiment, and a longitudinal field experiment.
