Massive LinkedIn study reveals who actually helps you get that job
A recent experiment that involved more than 20 million people on the professional social networking site LinkedIn over five years shows that the stronger the newly added ties were, the less likely they were to lead to a job transmission for the participants. It reveals the fact that weak ties are more helpful than strong ties for job hunting. One might think strong ties are more helpful than weak ties because strong ties are the people who you know better and have a stronger connection with them. However, within the strong ties, your friends know the same people that you know familiar, and they share the same connections, same opportunities, and same company options as you do. People who belong to different communities can offer a whole new set of information and helpful connections. Moreover, we typically have more weak ties than strong ties, and those numerous weak ties could really lead us to new opportunities.
This LinkedIn study links closely to our course topics. Consider the following network.
The person labeled A has five friends (E,D,F,G,H). These friends are in a close network which they all know each other. However, the unique link to friendship B would help A to have access access to things she wouldn’t necessarily hear about. The path between A and B is a bridge because deleting the edge would cause A and B to lie in two different components. In other words, this edge is the only route between its endpoints, the nodes A and B. Good jobs are scarce, and the bridge that helps A to explore different opportunities is more useful than the paths like A-E or A-D. However, we should not ignore the benefit of the strong ties like A-E and A-D. Strong ties could provide you with important social support which is critical for you to become successful in the future. For example, consider the left part of the graph is Asian immigrant’s organizations and the right part is native Americans organization which all have strong ties within themselves. For node A, the bridge A-B connects to the native American organization is less helpful for him if he gets discriminated by workers that are not asian. The strong ties within Asian immigrants are really helpful.
As a conclusion, even if study shows weak ties are more beneficial for job seeking as it helps you to get more unique and special information, we should not ignore the importance of strong ties in work. Strong ties could really help us deal with difficulties and unfair treatment in real life. Equally valuing both types of tie could really benefit us in the long term.