Congrats on your 1,500 LinkedIn connections. But did they help you snag a job?
Weak online connections on job sites and social networking sites are no match for “strong connections” -- i.e., close friends and family members with whom you communicate at least once a month -- when it comes to landing a gig, according to a new study from the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
The survey of 424 college-grad LinkedIn users, published this week in the INFORMS journal Management Science, asked about various job-search avenues: job sites like Monster.com, social-networking sites like LinkedIn, print media, close friends and family offline, and career centers and recruiters. It also took stock of how many leads, interviews and offers those channels spawned, and measured the number and strength of the job hunters’ connections.
Job sites produced the most leads, and weak LinkedIn connections yielded slightly more leads than strong connections -- but interviews and offers were most likely to come from strong ties, the study found. In fact, a 10% increase in strong ties -- roughly a one-tie bump -- increased job offers by 0.7% on average. Increasing weak ties by 10% -- the equivalent of about 10 ties -- seemed to diminish the number of offers by 1.3%.