Forty years ago Mark Granovetter wrote a seminal article called “The Strength of Weak Ties” that upended conventional wisdom about the best way to find a job. Connections via good friends, so people said, were the ticket to employment. When Granovetter surveyed 54 people who had recently changed jobs, he found that weaker acquaintances typically provided the best job leads, as they have more access to different kinds of information than close friends. Despite the small sample size, his scholarly article became very influential and is cited by more than 23,000 publications on Google Scholar.
Granovetter is wrong, says a new piece of research. It turns out that good friends are the best way to find a job, even though most people who are networking to find work do succeed through weaker social connections. After reviewing patterns among millions of U.S. Facebook users, Tufts assistant professor of economicsLaura Gee and Jason Jones, a postdoctoral researcher at UC-San Diego, now disagree with one of the most famous papers on the science of getting hired.
The still unpublished study, “Social Networks and Labor Markets: How Strong Ties Relate to Job Transmission Using Facebook’s Social Network,” notes that most people do end up linking to a job through weak ties, only because people have more weak ties than friendships. “When stronger ties exist they help more, suggesting that strong relationships are important for finding employment,” according to a synopsis of the findings available on the Internet.
The study is the latest example of how vast social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn have given researchers unprecedented insights. Now they can analyze the behavior of hundreds of thousands or millions of people whereas in the past they relied on just hundreds or thousands of samples.
For example, researchers have used Facebook data to discern clues to help address medical problems. One study looked at publicly available profiles of college students who made frequent references to drinking and found that indeed these are the people most likely to suffer from alcoholism. It suggested that clinics and peer leaders such as a dorm resident counselor might be able to use such data to recommend counseling or help.
Compared with the massive scope of Facebook, many famed 20th century research insights came from relatively tiny samples.
Stanley Milgram’s famous 1967 study of social connections that made “six degrees of separation” a common expression involved 160 people who sent letters from Nebraska and 145 who did the same from Kansas. Each study participant sought to reach two target people in the Boston area through someone they knew, who knew someone else, and so on. A Facebook-powered study in 2011 looked at 721 million active Facebook users and 69 billion connections and found that the true number of degrees of separation between any two people is 4.74.
Although Granovetter published his study 40 years ago, he is still going strong and is a professor at Stanford. “The article raises very interesting questions, which should certainly be asked, and I think it is a good idea to use Facebook data for this purpose,” he said. “I also admire the Facebook research team for making their data available to researchers as freely as they have.”
However he expressed two reservations about the study which he has read ahead of its publication. He disagreed with how they defined strong ties as well as how they figured out how people got jobs.
“The researchers actually have no information about how their subjects found their jobs, instead inferring ‘job transmission’ by the presence of a Facebook contact at your new employer at least a year before you joined that company, and having been a Facebook friends at least that long,” he said. “While it is probably true that some people found jobs through contacts who fit these conditions, we have no way of knowing what proportion of actual transmissions of job information are in this category.”
The objection highlights the difference between in-depth interviews of a small sample of people, and inferred insights from big data about millions of people.
“What is needed here is some validity check on how well these criteria of ‘job transmission’ actually match subjects’ reports of whom they learned about their new job from, and the authors have not undertaken such a check,” Granovetter said. “That being the case, while the results are certainly interesting, it’s hard to view them as persuasive.”
Gee declined to comment, saying she had agreed with Facebook not to speak out prior to the academic publication of her study.
It seems clear that Internet social networks provide insights about us never before available. But the best insights likely would come from matching traditional social science interviews of hundreds of people with the big data insights from millions of people.
via Your Best Friends Are Still Your Best Way To Get A New Job – Forbes.
Your Best Friends Are Still Your Best Way To Get A New Job
