A single message sent to a casual acquaintance via social media can be the key to landing your dream job..
That’s the conclusion of a five-year study of over 20 million users on the professional networking site LinkedIn, researchers report in the Sept. 16 Science. This study is the first to experimentally test an almost 50-year-old theory of social science. weak social tiesStrong people matter more than those who are strong in order to get ahead in life, and for finding a good job.
“The weak tie theory is one of the most celebrated and cited findings in social science,” says network scientist Dashun Wang of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who coauthored a perspective pieceThe same issue also contains Science. This study “provides the first causal evidence for this idea of weak ties explaining job mobility.”
Stanford University sociolog Mark Granovetter In 1973, the weak tie theory was proposed.. This theory has been cited in nearly 67,000 scientific publications. It is based on the notion that humans cluster together. Social spheres that are connected by bridges (SN: 8/13/03). These bridges create weak social ties and provide individuals with access to new ideas and information about the job market.
In recent years, however, this influential theory has been under attack. A 2017 analysis in the Journal of Labor EconomicsA study of 6 million Facebook users found that more interaction with friends online leads to stronger social ties. Increased likelihood of working together with this friend.
In the new study, LinkedIn gave Sinan Aral, a managerial economist at MIT, and his team access to data from the company’s People You May Know algorithm, which recommends new connections to users. Over five years, the social media site’s operators used seven variations of the algorithm for users actively seeking connections, each recommending varying levels of weak and strong ties to users. The site recorded 600,000 job changes and 2 billion new ties during that period.
Aral and his coworkers measured tie strength using the number mutual LinkedIn connections and direct messaging between users. Two criteria must be met to make a job transition: the pair must have connected on LinkedIn within the last year of the job seeker joining the company. The user who joined the company for the first time must also have been there at least one full year before they join the second. These criteria were put in place to prevent the possibility that they could end up at the same employer by accident.
The team concluded that weaker ties are more likely to result in job changes than stronger ones. But the study adds a twist to the theory: When job hunting, mid-tier friends are more helpful than either one’s closest friends or near strangers. Aral says that these friends are those with whom you have approximately 10 connections but rarely interact. “They’re still weak ties, but they are not the weakest ties.”
Researchers also discovered that if a user has weaker connections to their network, they apply to more jobs, which in turn leads to more job opportunities. This finding only applies to highly digitized jobs like those that are heavily dependent on software or can be remote worked from. Some job seekers in the digital world found that strong ties were better than weaker ties. Aral thinks these jobs might be more local, and so are dependent on tight-knit community members.
The finding that job seekers should lean on mid-level acquaintances corroborates smaller studies, says network scientist Cameron Piercy of the University of Kansas in Lawrence who wasn’t involved in either the 2017 study or this more recent one.
That evidence suggests that the weakest acquaintances lack enough information about the job candidate, while the closest friends know too much about the candidate’s strengths — and flaws. “There’s this medium-ties sweet spot where you are willing to vouch for them because they know a couple people that you know,” Piercy says.
However, he and others raised ethical concerns about the study. Piercy worries about research that manipulates people’s social media spaces without clearly and obviously indicating that it’s being done. In the new study, LinkedIn users who visited the “My Network” page for connection recommendations — who make up less than 5 percent of the site’s monthly active users — got automatically triggered into the experiment.
And it’s unclear how LinkedIn, whose researchers are coauthors of the study, will use this information moving forward. “When you are talking about people’s work, their ability to make money, this is important,” Piercy says. The company “should recommend weak ties, the version of the algorithm that led to more job attainment, if its purpose is to connect people with work. But they don’t make that conclusion in the paper.”
Another problem was that the data analysis did not include vital demographic information about users. The researchers claim that this was due to privacy concerns. But breaking down the results by gender is crucial as some evidence suggests that women — but not men — must rely on both weak and strong ties for professional advancement, Northwestern’s Wang says.
Still, with over half of jobs generally found through social ties, the findings could point people toward better ways to hunt for a job in today’s tumultuous environment. “You may have seen these recommendations on LinkedIn and you may have ignored them. You think ‘Oh, I don’t really know that person,’” Aral says. “But you may be doing yourself a disservice.”
