Finding the right job is not just what you know or even who you know but increasingly who your contacts know. Fortunately, the Internet makes it easier to leverage the relationships you already have. Here are five tips to help you land the job you want:

1. Reconnect with former colleagues, classmates, clients and business partners. Online tools can help.

2. Help your contacts with introductions and chances are they will return the favor.

3. Find out which of your colleagues knows people who are currently hiring. New networking sites with integrated job boards make it easy.

4. When you get an interview, use people search engines to research the backgrounds of the professionals who will interview you.

5. Join a professional network such as LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/jobs), which is the largest with 5 million users. You can access over 4 million job listings, and for any job, you can see which of your contacts can refer you to the hiring manager.

Degrees of separation may be more important to help you land that dream job than your academic degrees.

Your network of contacts can help you obtain referrals to hiring managers.

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