Silicon Valley Companies Realize the Value of Weak Ties
It is not surprising that more than 40% of jobs come from referrals. This hiring system creates a cycle of hiring people who have ties with those already hired. In fact, typical tech companies in a Silicon Valley consist of tight networks: mostly of a team of MIT and Stanford white male engineers. Hiring most talented students from prestigious schools is essentially a good thing, but lacking diversity in a team can be bad in a long term. To solve this problem, companies started to reach networks of underrepresented engineers, designers, and managers in belief that these people will link them to the tight network that they cannot see.
The article suggests a few strategies how to promote diversity in a company. First one has to be authentic based on a core business rationale. Since only promoting diversity is not a goal but hiring diverse of good people is, one should not have preconceptions when reaching out to new branch of people. Second is to be consistent. Just realizing benefits of diversity will not promote diversity by itself, so one has to be consistent in his/her effort. To achieve this, for example, one in a Silicon Valley company can go to hackathon at schools in East Coast and try an information session there or hold a meeting with teams of underrepresented engineers such as “Black Girls CODE” and “Women in computing”. Last, since the process is not done after hiring, one should focus on their being successful at their career afterward. To fully give what they have, they should have faith in a company and believe that its efforts are authentic. Unfortunately, statistics say that the retention and promotion rate of non-white employees is worse than hiring. Because companies’ policies can have great impact on this record, they have to keep in mind that the process does not end with just hiring people.
In general, this phenomenon can be explained by the strength of weak ties. People intuitively think that they would get more information from people with strong ties, but in fact, the opposite is true. It is very likely that close-knit group shares similar opinions. So new information usually comes through a local bridge which is weak tie linking one to other groups with different backgrounds who share different opinions.