l’ve been meaning to comment on this WSJ article for some time, but I just never had a chance to get back to it until now. Carl Bialnik’s November 16th column “Sorry, You May Have Gone Over Your Limit of Friends,” Bialnik focuses on Oxford professor Robert Dunbar whose 1993 study publicized that notion that there is a maximal number of relationships that can be maintained at any time.
. . . Prof. Dunbar’s research has focused on average friend-circle sizes, not maxima. There is a wide variation in the size and makeup of people’s friend groups. He cited a range of 100 to 300 in a 2003 paper.
Most people recognize that technology can expand your circle of contacts, though the intimacy of those relationships is often strengthened by real time interactions. The expanded quantity of weaker connections may actually be better for us all in the long run, at least professionally.
About.com’s Article “Networking to a New Career” points out that:
surveys consistently show that 80-85% of job-seekers find work as the result of a referral from a friend or colleague, and only 2-4% land jobs from Internet job boards.
Here’s where those growing networks of extended connections on sites like LinkedIn and FaceBook really pay off. Mark Granovetter published a groupbreaking study in 1973 within the American Journal of Sociology. Within, he reveals “The Strength of Weak Ties.”
Of those finding a job through contacts, 16.7% reported that they saw their contact often at the time, 55.6% said occasionally, and 27.8% rarely. . . In many cases, the contact was someone only marginally included in the current network of contacts, such as an old college friend or a former workmate, with some sporadic contact had been maintained
Basically, that friend of a friend of a friend could be your ticket to your next job. I wonder about the reasons why those extended networks are so fortuitous. Perhaps people more removed from you can just objectively pass opportunities along to strangers; whereas, your closest connections might pre-screen opportunities they pass along, thinking they know your tastes and interests well enough to do so.
No related posts.
It also has to do with the type of reference that people give. Recommending the guy who you go out for drinks with every friday means that you two have a friendship bond, and are more likely to bring that into the office, while the bosses might want to maintain a professional atmosphere. If you recommend someone as the friend of your friend, then it is implied to the company that you don’t know them well, which means that there is less goofing off and a professional barrier between the two of you.