Imagine you’re looking for a new job. To improve your LinkedIn profile and to expand your social network, you go to LinkedIn.
To find a prospective employer, who should you approach?
A new studyPublished in ScienceThis shows that close friends (on LinkedIn), are not the best option. Instead, you should consider acquaintances who you don’t know enough to make a personal connection.
The strength and stability of weak ties
In 1973, an American sociologist was founded Mark Granovetter“The phrase was coined by the author of “The strength of weak bonds” in the context social networks. He believed that stronger ties between people will lead to more friendship networks.
Simply put, you’re more likely to know close friends than acquaintances.
You probably know everything in your immediate area if you are looking for a job. Intuitively, it is the weak ties – your acquaintances – that offer the most opportunities for new discoveries.
Weak ties and job opportunities
Granovetter’s theory seems right, but is it true? An international team of researchers from MIT, Harvard Business School and Stanford set out to collect empirical evidence about how weak ties impact job mobility.
Their research was supported and supported by engineers from LinkedIn, who tested and improved the platform’s “People You May Know” recommendation system. LinkedIn frequently updates this algorithm which recommends people to join your network.
One update tested the effect of encouraging strong ties (recommending adding close friends) over weak ties. To determine if the differences in employment outcomes, the researchers followed users who participated in the “A/B Testing”.
Randomly, more than 20 million LinkedIn users around the world were assigned to one of several well-defined treatment areas. Users were given slightly different contact recommendations for each group. This led to stronger ties between users in certain groups and weaker ties among others.
Next, the team measured the number and frequency of job applications for each group. Particularly important are job transmissions, which are when a new contact gets a job at the same company. Job transmissions indicate that the job was landed by the new contact.
Best are moderately weak ties
Causative analysis is used to examine the relationship between employment and link formation. Three important findings are highlighted.
The recommender engine has a significant impact on link formation. Users who were advised more weak links made significantly more weaker links. Users who were also recommended more strong link formed stronger links.
Second, the experiment shows that moderately weak ties can help job-seekers join new employers twice as effectively as stronger ties.
What is a “moderately weak” tie? Study found that job transmission is most likely to occur through acquaintances who have about 10 mutual friends but rarely interact.
Third, industries have different strengths for weak ties. While weak ties increase job mobility in digital industries with greater digital capabilities, strong ties can lead to more job mobility in digitally less developed industries.
More recommendations
LinkedIn’s study is the first to prove Granovetter’s theory in the job market. It is important to use causal analysis. Large-scale studies of the relationship between strong ties and job transmission have revealed that stronger ties are better, in what was thought to be paradox.
This study clarifies the paradox and demonstrates the limitations of correlation research, which often lead to wrong conclusions and poor disentangling of confounding factors.
Practically, the study suggests the best parameters to suggest new links.
It revealed that the connections most helpful in landing a job are your acquaintances, people you meet in professional settings, or friends of friends, rather than your closest friends – people with whom you share about 10 mutual contacts and with whom one is less likely to interact regularly.
These insights can be used to create algorithmic recommendations that can help job-seekers land jobs.
Black boxes have the power to change lives
Public is often concerned when large social media companies experiment on their users (see Facebook’s famous 2014 emotion experiment).
LinkedIn’s experiment could have caused harm to its users. The users in the “strong links” group may have missed weak links that could have helped them get their next job.
However, all groups had some degree of job mobility – some just a bit more than others. The researchers were also observing an engineering experiment so the study raises no ethical concerns.
Nonetheless, it is a reminder to ask how much our most intimate professional decisions – such as selecting a new career or workplace – are determined by black-box artificial intelligenceAlgorithms whose inner workings we can’t see.
Marian-Andrei RizoiuSenior Lecturer in Behavioral Science Data Science University of Technology Sydney
This article has been republished from The ConversationUnder a Creative Commons License Please read the Original article.
