Are you looking for a job? It's a good idea to check out your social network when you visit LinkedIn.
Who should you reach out to to find out more about a new job?
According to a new study of more than 20 million people, you should look to acquaintances you don't know well enough to share a personal connection with.
The phrase " the strength of weak ties" was invented by Mark Granovetter. The more strong the ties between two people, the more their friendship networks will overlap.
You are most likely to know most of the friends of a close friend, but not many of the friends of an acquaintances.
If you're looking for a job, you already know what your neighborhood has to offer. Weak ties are the most likely to offer new discoveries.
Is Granovetter's theory correct? A group of researchers from Harvard Business School, MIT, and LinkedIn set out to find out if weak ties affect job mobility.
Engineers at LinkedIn worked to test and improve the platform's "People You May Know" recommendation system. New people are encouraged to join your network.
Encouraging the formation of strong ties versus weak ties was tested in one of the updates. The researchers followed the users that took part in the A/B testing to see if the difference affected their employment outcomes.
More than 20 million people were assigned to treatment groups on the professional networking site. Users in some groups formed stronger ties and users in other groups formed weaker ties after seeing slightly different contact recommendations.
The team measured how many jobs users applied for and how many jobs they got. A job transmission is when you get a job in the same company as the new contact. The new contact may have helped land the job.
The study connects link formation with employment by using causality analysis. Three important findings have been found.
Link formation is greatly shaped by the recommender engine. Users who were recommended more weak links formed stronger links.
The experiment shows that weak ties are more effective than strong ties in helping a jobseeker join a new employer.
A weak tie is what it is. According to the study, job transmission is most likely from acquaintances with whom you don't interact much.
Weak ties were different by industry. Weak ties did not increase job mobility in more digital industries.
Granovetter's theory in the employment market has been proved by this study. Large-scale studies of correlations between strength of ties and job transmission have shown that strong ties are more beneficial in the long run than previously thought.
The limitations of correlation studies, which do a poor job at disentangling factors and sometimes lead to the wrong conclusions, have been proved again by this study.
The study outlines the best parameters to suggest links.
It was found that the connections that are most helpful in landing a job are your acquaintances, people you meet in professional settings, or friends of friends.
The recommendation engines of professional networks can be even better at helping job-seekers land jobs if they translate these into algorithmic recommendations.
When large social media companies conduct experiments on their users, the public is wary.
Could the experiment have hurt its users? The users in the "strong link" treatment group may have missed weak links that could have helped them land their next job.
All groups had at least some degree of job mobility. Since the researchers were observing an engineering experiment, they seem to have few ethical concerns.
Asking how much of our most intimate professional decisions are determined by black-box artificial intelligence is a reminder.
Rizoiu is a senior lecturer in behavioral data science.
Under a Creative Commons license, this article is re-posted. The original article is worth a read.
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