Experimental Proof for The Power of Weak Ties in Job Hunting
LinkedIn and other career networking media platforms have consistently been one of the top two methods for new Cornell graduates to find jobs in recent years. Most people in search of an internship or a job now have an up to date LinkedIn profile. And for most of those people, their connections mostly consist of people they’re not very familiar with. And according to “A causal test of the strength of weak ties,” a paper published by researchers from MIT, Harvard and Stanford, for most people, it also tends to be the people users are not very familiar with that help them land jobs. The usefulness of weak ties has been widely acknowledged for decades, ever since Granovetter’s paper in 1973 which was mentioned in class, but it’s been hard to prove until now.
LinkedIn is the biggest networking platform on the planet, and the way it allows so many more weak ties to be created is changing the world’s job market. The authors of the paper utilized LinkedIn’s People You May Know algorithm to conduct experiments, collecting data from 20 million LinkedIn accounts over 5 years. In order to collect data, LinkedIn modified the PYMK algorithm for those users, showing some people more suggestions for people they had a weak link to, and showing others a larger proportion of people they had weak links to. Over these 5 years, between the 20 million users, about 2 billion new connections were made, 70 million job applications were sent, and 600,000 new jobs were accepted through LinkedIn. And in this data, it was found that moderately weak ties (with at most 10 mutual connections), followed by very weak ties, actually increased job mobility the most.
This relationship makes sense– someone not in your group of tight-knit friends generally has access to different useful information than the information shared amongst your group. In class, an example was made about how bridges between friend groups tend to benefit a lot more by being the source where information is exchanged. Weak links are essential for information to be passed between clusters, and being the bridge allows you to access that information faster, which can be an excellent help in looking for a new job. And logically, having more weak ties would give you access to more sources of information, and therefore more information about new job opportunities.
Source: https://news.mit.edu/2022/weak-ties-linkedin-employment-0915