Tim Harford explains why your friends and family are not the most valuable members of your extended social network … at least when it comes to looking for jobs:
This dispiriting stuff reminded me of Mark Granovetter’s work on “the strength of weak ties”, published in 1973. Granovetter, a sociologist, brought together two disparate strands of work: a survey of how people with professional or managerial jobs had found those jobs; and a theoretical analysis of the structure of social networks.
Start with the theoretical observation first: the most irreplaceable social connections, paradoxically, are often rather weak or distant ones. A family group or clique of close friends all tend to know each other and know similar things at similar times. Their social ties are strong but also redundant, in the sense that there are many different paths through which information could pass from one member of that group to another.
By contrast, “weak ties” between one social cluster and another are valuable precisely because the social contact is unusual. Information passed along a weak tie will often be totally new — and if it doesn’t arrive through the weak tie, it is unlikely to arrive at all.
Granovetter then supplemented this theoretical idea with his survey, showing that it was very common for people to find jobs — especially managerial jobs and jobs with which they were satisfied — through personal contacts. The old saw is true: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Or as Granovetter put it in his book Finding a Job, what matters most is “one’s position in a social network”.
But this is not because of crude nepotism: the key contacts who helped jobseekers find jobs were typically distant rather than close friends — old college contacts, perhaps, or former colleagues. Granovetter’s analysis made this finding make sense: it’s the more peripheral contacts who tell you things you don’t already know.
This observation has certainly been true for many of my jobs: colleagues from a decade or more in the past suddenly pop up with an interesting position or business opportunity (such contacts are all the more interesting because they’re completely unexpected).
