Strong and Weak Ties When Recruiting Diverse Talent
In our class, we learned that social networks are important. Weak ties between people are usually characterized as someone you’re not around much or an acquaintance you don’t know well. Strong ties are family and close friends that know each other very well. From class we know that both strong and weak ties play important roles—we learned that weak ties are usually better for when we’re looking for a new job because an acquaintance would add more to our knowledge than a friend would (we usually have friends that are aware of the same things we are).
This article presents the benefit of weak ties in a different way; he looks at the flipside of job searching—recruiting. The writer discusses how in the tech space, many companies have strong networks that aren’t very diverse. These strong ties hinder teams from recruiting diverse, underrepresented candidates because the people in these networks only have connections with the same types of people with the same background. He compares this to a team with strong and weak ties that allow its recruiting reach to be much broader and diverse. This is a positive thing because it brings different talents and perspectives to the work space. I believe this article provided another awesome way to view weak ties in a positive light.