Your Friends Can't Help You

Hi friend,

Around 1970, a Harvard graduate student named Mark Granovetter crossed the Charles River into Newton, a suburb of Boston, to find out how men got their jobs.

He surveyed 282 professional, technical and managerial workers who had recently changed jobs, and interviewed a hundred of them in person. Most had not found the work through an advertisement or a cold application. They had heard about it from someone they knew. So Granovetter asked those men a question nobody had thought worth asking: around the time this person told you about the job, how often were you seeing them?

He expected the answer to be often, and so would you. The people who help us are the people who care about us, and the people who care about us are the ones we see every week.

Of the men who found their job through a personal contact, 16.7 percent saw that person often. 55.6 percent saw them only occasionally, and 27.8 percent saw them rarely, which in Granovetter's coding meant once a year or less. When he asked whether a friend had told them about the job, the answer he heard most was some version of not a friend, an acquaintance.

The contacts were old classmates, former colleagues, a previous employer, people the men had kept up with only now and then. Granovetter published the finding in 1973 under a title that sounds like a contradiction, The Strength of Weak Ties, and it became one of the most cited papers in the history of sociology.

The reason behind it is uncomfortable, and it explains a great deal.

Your close friends would do almost anything for you. What they cannot do is tell you something you don't already know. You go to the same places, talk to the same people and read the same things, so whatever reaches them has most likely reached you already. A circle of close friends is a room where everyone has heard the same news.

The acquaintance is different. He moves in a world you never see. He hears about the opening at his company, the client who needs someone, the person looking for exactly what you do, and he hears it before it reaches anyone in your circle. He is a bridge into a room you have never been in.

Strong ties give you support. Weak ties give you information, and information is what a new opportunity is made of.

For fifty years this was a strong theory with a weak test, since Granovetter's sample was small and could only show a correlation. In 2022, five researchers from MIT, Stanford, Harvard and LinkedIn ran the test properly.

LinkedIn's "People You May Know" feature recommends new connections, and over five years the platform randomly varied how many weak and strong ties it suggested to more than 20 million users. In that time those users formed two billion new connections and took 600,000 new jobs. Because the variation was random, the researchers could see what the ties themselves caused, and they published the results in Science.

Weak ties produced more job changes than strong ones, but the result had a shape Granovetter had not predicted. The very weakest ties, people you have almost nothing in common with, did less than expected. The best results came from ties the researchers called moderately weak: people with whom you share around ten mutual connections and rarely speak, close enough to trust you and far enough away to know things you don't.

There was one exception worth knowing. In less digital industries, strong ties did better, so if your field runs on local reputation and family firms, your inner circle still counts for more.

Here is what to do with this, whether you have just graduated, have outgrown your job, or are trying to land the next client.

Make the list. Write down the people you used to know and drifted away from: the classmate who went into a different field, the colleague from your first job, the person you met once at an event and liked. Aim for twenty names. Most people find the list runs longer than they expected, and that they have not spoken to anyone on it in over a year.

Contact three a week. Don't ask for anything in the first message. Ask what they are working on now, and mean it, because you will learn something either way.

Tell them what you are looking for, specifically. This is the step almost everyone skips. An acquaintance cannot pass along an opportunity he does not know you want. I'm looking for work gives him nothing to match against. I'm looking for a junior marketing role at a company that sells software gives him a shape, and the next time he hears something that fits, he will think of you.

Keep the bridge standing. A weak tie is useful only while it still exists. A message twice a year costs you five minutes.

For a long time I filed all of this under networking, and networking under the things insincere men do at conferences. That was the wrong objection. Nothing here asks you to pretend. It asks you to stop assuming that everything you need will come from the five people you already see every week.

The men in Newton were not hired because they were the most talented candidates in Boston. Many of them only learned the job existed because someone they barely knew mentioned it, at the right moment, to the right person.

Who on your list have you not spoken to in a year?

Until next time
Lorenc - Founder of Success Skill