OK This is a great story. Over at the blog 'One Day One Job' Willy Franzen is reporting on a cool experiment. They encouraged new graduates to advertise themselves to employers using Faceook. The results were pretty interesting.
This story reflects an updated version of what we learned in research by Mark Granovetter some 30 years ago: people find jobs from 'weak' ties rather than strong ties. Strong ties are close friends and family, people with whom you have frequent and repeated interactions. These kinds of ties are great for trust and friendship exchanges, however when it comes to finding out about unique opportunities, they are less useful. Why? Because these networks of strong ties are quite 'dense' - everyone has similar, and therefore redundant information. What you need for finding unique information (e.g. job opportunities) is connections to a diverse network. This means weaker connectioned to a broader range of unconnected people.
Facebook, linked-in and other similar social networks are exactly the sort of networks that can provide a broad range of 'weak' ties. What Willy Franzen has demonstrated with this experiment is how we can leverage these technologies to exploit a true fact about job hunting: the strength of weak ties!
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