Techniques introduced here include a system and method for determining whether to provide a user of a social networking system with candidate users (i.e., potential contacts) with whom the user does not already have any connections with. In some embodiments, the system generates a set of candidate users based on a value (e.g., to the social networking system) associated with each potential connection formed between the user and the set of candidate users. In one or more embodiments, the system ranks the candidate users based on their connection-value to the social networking system and provides the ranked candidate users as suggested new connections to the user.