Most companies do not know what their collective professional network actually looks like. They know individual employees have contacts, they may have a vague sense that certain people are well-connected, but the actual shape of the network as a whole is invisible. Before you can use that network systematically for hiring, you need a baseline.
This is the analysis we run with every new customer in our first session. It is not complicated, but it requires thinking about your employees' networks in aggregate rather than individually. Here is how we approach it.
Step 1: Define what you are trying to cover
Start with the open roles or role categories you are actually trying to fill, not an abstract wish for better recruiting. Network coverage analysis is only meaningful in relation to a specific hiring need. Coverage for a senior machine learning engineer role looks completely different from coverage for an enterprise account executive role, even within the same company.
For each role or role category, list the two or three professional background types that would qualify a candidate. Not just job titles, but the specific experience contexts: which industries, which functional areas, which technical domains. This gives you a target profile to match against network coverage.
If you are hiring across several role types, group them. You do not need to run a separate analysis for every open position. Technical roles cluster together. Go-to-market roles cluster. Operations and finance cluster. Three to five coverage maps covers most growing tech companies' hiring needs adequately.
Step 2: Identify your connectors by domain, not by connection count
Once you know what you are hiring for, the next step is identifying which employees have networks that overlap meaningfully with those target profiles. This is not the same as finding your most-connected employees.
An employee with 1,800 connections who has spent their career in consumer marketing is not your best source for backend engineering candidates, regardless of how large their network is. An engineer who spent six years at two infrastructure companies and maintained close relationships across those teams may have 350 connections and be your single best source for exactly those roles.
Go through your employee list and, for each person, map their domain coverage: where have they worked, what kinds of teams and roles were they closest to, and which professional communities are they active in? In Drafted, this happens automatically through the connection metadata analysis when employees authorize their accounts. If you are doing this manually, a short survey or one-on-one conversation with each employee covers it quickly for teams under fifty people.
Step 3: Assess depth, not just presence
For each domain you care about, you now have a set of employees who have network coverage there. The next question is: how deep is that coverage? An employee who passed through a company three years ago and connected with twenty people on LinkedIn has surface-level coverage. An employee who worked closely with a team for four years, maintained relationships, and has a dozen mutual connections with key people in that space has real depth.
Indicators of depth to look for: shared employer tenures of two or more years, multiple mutual connections between the employee and potential candidates, connection recency (connections made or renewed within the past three years), and the employee's own assessment of who they would actually reach out to on behalf of the company.
That last one is important and often skipped. Employees know the quality of their own relationships better than any graph metric does. A quick conversation, "Who in your network would actually take your call about a role like this?" surfaces the real connectors faster than any automated scoring alone.
Step 4: Map coverage against open roles to find your gaps
With domain coverage and depth identified, you can now compare your collective network coverage against your actual open roles. For each role, ask: do we have at least two employees with genuine depth-of-connection in this domain? If yes, you have warm path potential. If no, you have a coverage gap.
Coverage gaps tell you two things. First, they identify roles where you should expect to rely more on cold sourcing, at least until you build network coverage through hiring into those domains. Second, they highlight where your next hires could specifically strengthen your future referral coverage. A company that needs to build out a product design function might prioritize hiring a first designer who has deep connections in the design community, precisely because that person's network will enable the next five design hires to come through warm introductions.
Step 5: Document the network map and revisit it quarterly
A network coverage map is not a one-time artifact. It changes as your team changes. Every new hire brings new network coverage into the company. Departures remove coverage. Employee networks grow and evolve over time as people stay in contact with former colleagues, attend industry events, and build new professional relationships.
In Drafted, this analysis updates automatically as new employees connect their accounts and as connection data refreshes. For teams doing this manually, a quarterly revisit with new hires included is sufficient to keep the picture accurate.
The baseline map also gives you a concrete way to talk to employees about referrals. Instead of sending a generic "do you know anyone?" email to the whole company, you can go to specific employees with specific requests: "You have strong connections in SaaS sales operations. We are opening two roles in that area. Would you be open to making an introduction for the right candidate?" That specificity is what converts a passive network into active referrals.
What this analysis will not tell you
Network mapping gives you coverage information, not candidate quality. Knowing that three of your engineers have strong connections in distributed systems does not tell you whether those connections are actively looking, whether they are the right seniority, or whether they would be interested in your company specifically. The map is the first step in a process, not a candidate list.
It also does not replace the need for a clear job brief. Warm introductions work best when the connector can give the candidate a specific, honest picture of the role and the team. Vague role descriptions make it hard for employees to self-select which of their contacts would be a good fit, which leads to lower-quality introductions and wasted everyone's time.
Think of the network map as your sourcing infrastructure. You would not run cold outreach without knowing which sourcing channels are available to you. The network map gives you the same visibility for warm paths. It tells you where the roads are before you decide which one to drive down.