Need a job? Look to your distant acquaintances for help
The study I have chosen to look at is a recent publication based on experiments conducted by LinkedIn and a group of researchers from 2015-2019 to better understand the networks theory of the strength of weak ties. The experiments were conducted on 20 million users who did not know that they were part of an experiment and who did not particularly consent to be a part of the study which does raise ethical concerns that I will not dive into here but deserve to be mentioned. The theory of the strength of weak ties, which we have studied in class, states that weak ties in an individual’s life can often be more beneficial and helpful in advancing social capital for the individual compared with stronger ties.
This theory was proved through the LinkedIn study which was able to demonstrate the importance of weak ties for finding jobs. The study is one of the first times the theory of the strength of weak ties was demonstrated in a large-scale prospective trial where participants were randomly assigned to either establish more strong or weak ties and see the effects. The study found that people who received more recommendations in their LinkedIn “People you may know” algorithm, generally applied to more jobs and accepted more jobs than their counterparts who randomly received more strong ties recommendations. Connections with whom users had only 10 mutual connections were found to be much more useful in finding a job compared with connections with whom users shared more than 20 mutual connections. The findings showed that a year after connecting on LinkedIn, individuals whose algorithm had provided more recommendations for weak-tie connections were twice as likely to get jobs at companies where these connections worked compared with individuals who received more recommendations for strong-ties. The study found in particular that the weak-tie connections were more beneficial at finding jobs in fields that relied heavily on software such as artificial intelligence jobs, but that strong ties were more helpful at finding jobs in less technology-focused industries. Overall, one of the main takeaways from this study was that the algorithms behind social networking are extremely important and can have big impacts on things that are very important in an individual’s life such as employment and unemployment.
I think that this is an interesting study because it is a very quantifiable way to measure the relative strength and weakness of ties between individuals. Since LinkedIn is essentially a way to make a network of connections for career purposes, it allows researchers and users alike to have a very clear perception of who is connected to who and at what strength of connection based on the number of mutual connections shared. It shows in a direct way how networks work and has clear metrics for classifying what a network means and the level of connectivity. I have seen this play out from personal experience that often I feel more comfortable reaching out to people that I know I have some connection with but who are not directly in my inner circle for help with jobs or employment. I think the small amount of distance allows the conversation and the dynamic of asking someone for assistance easier since you do not feel that you are using the friend relationship to get what you want but are instead relying on a business or more-professional type of relationship. I think it is interesting not only to distinguish between the strength of connections but also the type of connections: is this a distant work friend or a friend of a friend or is this one of your close friends from college? I think these dynamics also play into the ability to capitalize off of a connection and the comfortability each of us feels when asking for a favor.
Singer, Natasha. “LinkedIn Ran Social Experiments on 20 Million Users over Five Years.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 24 Sept. 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/24/business/linkedin-social-experiments.html.
Rajkumar, Karthik. A Causal Test of the Strength of Weak Ties | Science. Science , https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abl4476.