Social Networks and Labor Markets: How Strong Ties Relate to Job Finding on Facebook's Social Network
Gee, Jones and Burke test Granovetter's view that weak ties are more useful than strong ties for finding jobs, using data on about six million Facebook users. Because job help is hard to observe directly, they use a proxy: people who eventually work with a pre-existing friend. They link this to objective measures of tie strength. Most people, they find, are helped through one of their many weak ties, but a single stronger tie is significantly more valuable at the margin. They present this as evidence opposite to Granovetter's prediction.
Gee, Jones and Burke test Granovetter's view that weak ties are more useful than strong ties for finding jobs, using data on about six million Facebook users. Because job help is hard to observe directly, they use a proxy: people who eventually work with a pre-existing friend. They link this to objective measures of tie strength. Most people, they find, are helped through one of their many weak ties, but a single stronger tie is significantly more valuable at the margin. They present this as evidence opposite to Granovetter's prediction.
Written from the abstract, University of Chicago Press journal page.
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Gee, L. K., Jones, J., & Burke, M. (2017). Social Networks and Labor Markets: How Strong Ties Relate to Job Finding on Facebook's Social Network. Journal of Labor Economics, 35(2), 485-518. doi:10.1086/686225 https://doi.org/10.1086/686225