Networking is a crucial part of raising money, landing clients, and marketing your business, especially in the early days of growing a startup. At The Swarm, we help founders and startup leaders bring together their collective networks to power recruiting, sales, and fundraising. Needless to say, we believe in the power of networks to accelerate company building. Below, we dive into why super connectors are critical to your company’s success, how to identify them within your network, and how best to leverage them.

Lately, it’s felt like every single tech giant out there has had major layoffs — including Amazon, Coinbase, Intel, Meta, Stripe, Twitter, and others. With these layoffs and a looming recession dominating news, hiring planning might feel harder to navigate than ever. Startups aren’t sure if they should scoop up laid-off talent, slow down recruiting, or freeze hiring altogether. So, how can you best navigate this changing landscape? And how does network recruiting come into play?

Today, referral programs are one of the most powerful recruiting strategies available to companies. Referrals are 85 times more likely to be hired than inbound candidates, over twice as fast to hire, and they stay with companies — on average — 70% longer than non-referrals.

Another day, another tech industry layoff. At least, that’s how it’s felt lately, with tech titans’ layoffs and hiring freezes dominating headlines. If you’re a startup watching this all happen, you may be wondering what this all means for your own growth and hiring — especially as the stock market falls and interest rates rise.

The Swarm enabled uMed to automate and scale relationship-based outreach with a centralized, searchable combined network organized by strength of relationships. By leveraging their extended network, uMed uncovered new opportunities and faster conversions in both business development and fundraising.

They can lean on existing relationships and shared experiences, on top of fit and intent signals, to move deals forward and accelerate their growth.

Quorum1's use of The Swarm exemplifies how network-driven organizations can harness the power of their extended networks to enhance their operations, foster collaboration, and create more opportunities.

Using The Swarm, 500 Emerging Europe is able to unify and search through their collective network. They're already using the platform to introduce founders to top talent and plan to use it for sales and other high-potential introductions.

The new GTM playbook is about building relationships and leveraging influence to drive deals forward. It’s no longer enough to rely on cold outreach and a flood of emails. The winners in today’s market will be the ones who tap into sales data 2.0 and capitalize on their network’s power.

The webinar emphasized the critical role of network operations in venture capital, highlighting how VCs have always relied on their networks for sourcing investment opportunities. The ability to map and leverage relationships is now recognized as essential across various aspects of a VC fund’s performance, including fundraising, deal sourcing, due diligence, and portfolio support.

Here's a practical playbook with ten insights for startup leaders focusing on building and leveraging their networks!

Experts explain the tactical, network-based approaches companies should take to succeed in 2023 — and why they matter: Richard Cho (Advisor & Former Chief Recruiting Officer at Gem), Nolan Church (CEO at Continuum), David Connors (Co-Founder & CEO at The Swarm). Panel event moderated by Opal Franklin (Events Lead at The Swarm).

We're releasing a new feature that automatically calculates and displays a "connection strength score" for each profile in your network. It's a game-changer to help lower the noise of weak connections and enhance the signal of strong connections.

Companies can now instantly sign up for a free account to build their company networks and activate it for sales, recruiting, fundraising, and more. More than 300 teams have joined the platform so far. We’ve watched them build and grow their company networks in real time. Here’s what we’ve seen.

Work overlaps is a new feature allowing our users to automatically find and import up to 300 former colleagues — even if they’re not connected on LinkedIn or via email.

The Swarm can now also be used for sales purposes, in addition to recruiting and building investor networks. New features allow you to use The Swarm to discover warm connection paths into target companies, identify net new target companies within your Swarm network, and prioritize your sales pipeline based on network connectivity.