It’s not what you know, it’s who you know?
The concept of networking has always been emphasized regardless of the career field. In a world of people, the relationships that a person creates and maintains has significant influence on numerous aspects of their life, whether it is a person’s career or their wellbeing. Recently, with the rise of social media comes a rise in the importance of one’s networks. In a study done several years ago by North Carolina State University, it was revealed that a person’s connections plays an especially important role when they are not explicitly looking for work, helping uncover opportunities that the person isn’t originally aware of. It is estimated that around 25% of jobs are currently filled through the influence of social networks. In addition, the chances that a job will be filled due to networks increases by 2% with every dollar increase in salary. A recent paper also examined the effect of strong versus weak ties on the job searching process and revealed that most leads came from weaker connections. However, the quality of leads was better with stronger connections. It was found that there was a greater chance of getting an interview or job offer from leads discovered through stronger connections.
The coexistence of strong and weak ties in one’s social networks work together to determine the flow of information that a person receives. Accordingly, the position that a person has within their social network is important, whether it is embedded in a closely knit group of strong ties or at the peripheral with connections to people outside of the group who each have their own close friend group. If the deletion of these outside ties causes the two groups to have no affiliation with each other, then it is known as a bridge. Since pure bridges are difficult to find in the real world, it is likely that this connection is a local bridge, with the people involved sharing no friends. And with the help of the Strong Triadic Closure Property, if can be proved that if a person has at least two strong ties, then the local bridge it is involved in must be a weak connection. Because there is a great chance that a person has at least two strong ties, we know that their bridge relationships are likely to be weak ties. While the information that members of a closely knit group are exposed to will be largely the same, different groups are likely to have access to different resources and information. A local bridge can serve to regulate information flow between the two groups and as a result, a weak connection exposes a person to opportunities that they would otherwise not be able to know from their close-knit group of friends. This explains why studies found that more leads on jobs are found through weak connections rather than strong ones. A person can only pursue an opportunity they know of, which explains the high percentage of jobs found with the help of social networks and the positive correlation it has with salary, since the higher the salary of a job, the rarer it is. And with the rise of social media, it is even easier to create and maintain weak ties through instant messaging and constant access to information about the people we know. As for the discovery that job leads introduced by stronger ties are more likely to turn into an interview and then an offer, it was proposed that the stronger the connection, the more effort one will put into turning a lead into a tangible job offer.
Article link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2017/09/11/using-social-networks-to-advance-your-career/