Unexcepted Strength of Weak Ties in Career Hunting
Source:Â https://techcrunch.com/2016/04/26/weak-ties-matter/
This article talked about a research done by Professor Mark Granovetter in 1973 and its application to nowadays real life. When we learnt about ties and connections of people in the graph theory, what we first pay attention to was the impact of strong ties. However, Everett Harper enlightened me by talking about the unexpected influences that a weak tie can make. During class, we briefly mentioned how having a weak tie could help people getting to have some insights on aspects that they do not normally perceive. Harper brought this topic more in-depth to career searching in the view point from both employers and employees. As an employee, having some weak tie with people who have diverse background or specialization in job hunting can significantly impact the possibility of getting a dream job. As employers, they also prefer their employees to be from diverse background. In this case, having weak ties with people in other racial background may play an important role because weak-tie referral can attract more people to the company.
What makes this article fascinating is that it enlightened my understanding of weak ties and how it can play a role in the real world. Personally, the understanding that I used to have about weak tie is similar to distant friends— you know them but you are not close to them. It is hard to imagine it can have such an important influence in our life. When we talked about strong and weak ties in the course, we mainly focused on strong ties and its affect on the real world, but we did not cover as much on weak ties. Not only it can give people insights about other bizarre and different aspects that is not familiar to them, it can also help people professionally or even help companies to increase their diversity. This article may also make us think more about the real life influences that strong and weak ties may have other than professional networking.
This also made me think about the data that we mentioned in our first problem set. It stated that according to a research done on the Facebook News Feed feature, people are more likely to share or like their distant friends’ (weak ties) posts than their close friends’. This may cause by the similar idea as mentioned above. Distant friends often tend to have access that closes friends do not. While people often share lots of similarity with their close friends, what their distant friends perceive may be more new and intriguing to them. Weak ties may sometimes be neglected by people in real life, however, they can be the source of fresh and distinctive ideas in our life.