“Getting My Foot in the Door”: How Job Seekers Form and Activate New Ties for Referrals

• In Event: Organizational Mechanisms of Inequality in Work and Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Existing scholarship on networks and job search has documented that job seekers’ access to referrals significantly increase their chances of success on the market and post-hire. But for early-career job seekers, they tend to lack existing networks with employees in hiring organizations capable of providing referrals, therefore who more effectively form and activate new ties for referrals determine who gains advantage in the early career. Theories on the strength of weak ties and network brokerage would predict that job seekers who reach out directly and widely to potential referrers may gain advantage while research on indirect ties acknowledge the use of intermediary ties that facilitate connections with hard-to-reach referrers. However, existing theories cannot explain how reaching referrers through intermediaries may be more effective than direct ties in generating returns when opportunities to connect are widely available. This puzzle emerges from my longitudinal interview study of 65 graduate student job seekers in searching for referrals to increase chances of employment in the US information technology industry. To account for this puzzle, this paper theorizes the learning benefits from connecting with intermediary ties that increase individuals’ motivations and capabilities of gaining help from new ties. Job seekers may gain capabilities to obtain help from new ties through intermediary ties, who 1) change the relational meanings of social ties, thus sustaining the motivation to seek help, and 2) coach styles of interaction, thus increasing the effectiveness of help-seeking. My findings show that job seekers who connected with intermediary ties before connecting with referrers were more successful in gaining referrals from new ties than those who reached out directly to potential referrers. This paper advances our understanding of network processes that lead to varied successes in early-career job search.

Author

• Yingjian Liang, Johns Hopkins University