If you have so far resisted befriending people that you wouldn’t normally call a friend in real life, here’s a good reason to acquiesce: these acquaintances could come in very handy when looking for a job or a new career.
You may already have a perfectly satisfactory career. But in our brutal economic environment, we all live with a tiny corner of dread in our souls about being voted off the island.
On a social network, you build up what is known in sociology circles as your “weak ties.” It turns out that people can often get jobs and spouses through people to whom they have weak ties — meaning acquaintances rather than their best friends.
In a seminal 1973 paper, Stanford professor Mark Granovetter laid out the importance of weak ties between acquaintances. Weak ties are particularly good for job searching, Mr. Granovetter argued, because acquaintances can expose a job candidate to a much wider range of possibilities than his or her close friends can. “Your weak ties are your windows on the world,” says Mr. Granovetter.
Social networks are practically the definition of weak ties. On a social network, you can be “friends” again with all sorts of people from your past — from your college girlfriend to your former math tutor.
Strangely, I find that the people who befriend me are often people who didn’t seem to like me at the time we knew each other in real life.
No matter, you are not really becoming their friend. Accept their friend request. Because next week, they may be posting this headline online: “Looking for a new CEO of my startup.”
Recently, Jim Bankoff, a senior adviser at Providence Equity Partners, was looking for a developer for one of his startups, a sports blogging network called SB Nation.
Mr. Bankoff changed his Facebook status update to “Looking for a rails developer who likes to chat about sports.” The message was distributed to his 818 friends. Within days, Bankoff’s acquaintances had forwarded him two candidates for the job.
In the past, Mr. Bankoff conducted such informal job hunts by sending out emails to his friends. But Facebook brought him a different set of candidates: “The two people I got the leads from were not people I would have thought to include (in an email),” Mr. Bankoff says.
You can do the same kind of networking with traditional methods, such as attending alumni association mixers and sending out Christmas cards. It just takes more work.
For many people social-network sites are easier to manage than multiple email lists. Social networks can also help you mask the fact that you’re looking for a job. Harvard Business School Professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski describes this phenomenon as the “pooling effect.”
And haven’t you ever noticed that the most persistent befrienders on social networks are people who have just been laid off? They’re quickly trying to build up their weak ties, but without the benefit of the pooling effect.
I recommend you build your weak ties before you’re voted off the island.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
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