The person who tells you about your next job is probably not your closest friend. When the sociologist Mark Granovetter asked professionals who had recently changed jobs whether a friend had told them about the new one, he often heard the same correction: “Not a friend, an acquaintance.”¹

Weak ties are those acquaintances: people you see now and then and don’t confide in. Granovetter’s 1973 argument is that they matter because they link you to social circles your close friends don’t reach, so they carry news, such as job openings, that you would not otherwise hear. Later research largely supports him, with important limits.

What Granovetter meant by a weak tie

In his 1973 paper “The Strength of Weak Ties,” Mark Granovetter described the strength of a relationship as a mix of four things: the time two people spend together, its emotional intensity, how much they confide in each other and the favors they exchange. A weak tie scores low on that combination. It is a real relationship, just a light one.¹

Why should the strength of a tie matter? Granovetter’s reasoning starts with overlap. The closer two people are, the more of each other’s friends they tend to share: close friends spend time together, so they meet each other’s friends, and they tend to be alike, so those friends get on when they meet.¹

Think about your three or four closest people. Most of them probably know one another, see the same people and hear the same news. A former colleague you have coffee with twice a year is different. She now spends her days with a group you have never met, and they know things your group doesn’t.

What this means for you: when you picture your network, don’t stop at people you would call friends. The old manager, the classmate you last saw at a wedding and the supplier you swap notes with are your weak ties, and Granovetter expected them to do the most surprising work.

Why weak ties bring news your friends don’t have

Weak ties carry new information because they are the links that bridge separate social circles. Granovetter argued in 1973 that a strong tie is almost never the only path between two groups, since your close friends’ close friends tend to know you too. So the bridges between groups are, almost always, weak ties.¹

A bridge, in network terms, is a link that is the only path between two people, and so the only route from one person’s contacts to the other’s. News that reaches you through your close circle has usually passed through people you already know. News that crosses a bridge comes from a place your circle doesn’t reach at all. Not every acquaintance is a bridge, but nearly every bridge is an acquaintance.

1. 1Close friends overlapthey know each other and hear the same news
2. 2Acquaintances move in other circlestheir contacts are mostly not yours
3. 3Some weak ties are bridgesthe only short path between two groups
4. 4New information crossesa job opening, a method, an introduction

As a hypothetical: your team is worried about a reorganization, and everyone at your lunch table has heard the same rumors. The person who mentions that a company across town is building a team like yours is more likely to be a former coworker or an old classmate, because they hear different rumors.

1. Your close circle: strong ties who mostly know each other, so they tend to hear the same news you do
2. The weak tie: an acquaintance in another circle; Granovetter argued that bridges like this one are almost always weak ties
3. The other circle: news that starts here, such as a job opening, reaches you (the ringed dot) most directly through the bridge

Granovetter drew one more distinction. Some weak ties link you to people who are already in your circle, and some reach people your circle never touches; the second kind are the channels through which distant ideas and information reach you.¹ Our own reading, which no study here measured directly, is that range matters more than size: ten acquaintances spread across teams, companies and fields will probably reach more circles than ten in the next row of desks.

Where Granovetter’s job changers heard about their jobs

Granovetter illustrated his weak-ties argument with a study he had recently completed of people who had changed jobs, a random sample of professional, technical and managerial workers in a Boston suburb. Of those who found their job through a personal contact, more than four in five had heard about it from someone they saw only occasionally or rarely at the time, not from someone they saw often.¹

The study

Limited evidence

Granovetter's survey of Boston-area job changers

Among interviewees who found a new job through a contact, 16.7 percent said they saw that contact often (at least twice a week), 55.6 percent occasionally and 27.8 percent rarely (once a year or less). Granovetter read the skew toward weak ties as a sign that where a contact sits in the network matters more than how motivated they are to help.¹

This is a small, old and narrow sample: 54 men in one suburb, reporting from memory how often they saw someone. Granovetter also measured tie strength by that one thing only, which covers just the first of his four ingredients, though he noted that interviews suggested the rest of the definition fit too; he had not thought of tie strength as a variable when he collected the data.¹ The full study appeared in his 1974 book Getting a Job, which, according to a library catalog summary, found personal contacts were the main way these men heard about jobs.²

Many of the contacts were only on the edge of the person’s life, such as an old college friend or a former workmate or employer, and chance meetings or mutual friends had brought them back into contact. The information also rarely traveled far: in most cases it came straight from the employer or passed through just one person in between.¹

Why would so many leads come from half-forgotten contacts rather than close friends? Granovetter’s answer was position, not goodwill: a close friend may be keener to help but mostly hears what you hear, while an old workmate who has moved on sits in another circle and can link you to an opening there. A footnote records a simpler explanation from Donald Light, that most of anyone’s ties are weak; Granovetter judged it unresolved for lack of data.¹

Take an invented example. A former colleague left for another company three years ago. You run into her at a birthday party, mention that your team is being wound down, and a week later she writes about an opening where she works: a contact on the edge of your life, brought back by chance, close to the job.

For your own search, the useful people may be the ones you have half forgotten. You don’t need a huge network of strangers; you need to stay findable by people you already know a little, and they can only pass on news if they know what you do and what you want next.

Further reading

• Getting a Job: A Study of Contacts and Careers

  by Mark Granovetter

  Granovetter's original study of how professional men near Boston found jobs through contacts, where the weak-ties idea began.

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Has the weak-ties theory held up?

Largely, yes, with a twist. In a 2022 Science paper, Karthik Rajkumar and four colleagues analyzed experiments in which LinkedIn randomly varied which connections its “People You May Know” feature suggested to more than 20 million members between 2015 and 2019. The new connections most likely to lead to a job move were moderately weak ties: people with some contacts in common but not many.³

Earlier large correlational studies had found that, tie for tie, close contacts were more likely to lead to a job. The randomized analysis reversed that result, but only partly: measured by contacts in common, the payoff rose as ties got weaker only up to a point, then fell. Two of the five authors are or were LinkedIn employees with a financial interest in Microsoft, and the study had no external funding.³ Our guide to how acquaintances and referrals fit into a job search covers the experiments’ limits.

Random assignment is what makes this test stronger than Granovetter’s survey. In everyday data, people who lean on acquaintances may differ from those who lean on friends in ways nobody recorded, such as how hard they are looking. Because LinkedIn assigned its suggestion settings at random, those differences should even out between groups, so a gap in job moves points to the ties themselves.

Formal referrals show how much hiring runs through people. At one US financial services firm, referred candidates were a small share of applicants but a much larger share of hires, though one firm’s records cannot show that a referral itself causes an offer.⁴

When strong ties beat weak ones

Strong ties can be worth more one for one, at least in correlational data. In a 2017 study of data from about 6 million Facebook users, Laura Gee, Jason Jones and Moira Burke found that most people who got job help got it through one of their many weak ties, but a single stronger tie was more valuable at the margin.⁵ They measured help indirectly, by spotting people who ended up working with someone who was already their Facebook friend.

Both findings can be true at once because of numbers. Picture someone with a handful of close friends and a few hundred acquaintances. Even if each friend is far more likely to help than each acquaintance, the acquaintances as a group can still produce most of the leads, because there are so many of them.

A follow-up by Gee and colleagues across 55 countries found this “paradox of weak ties” widely: more people got jobs where weak ties worked because weak ties were more numerous, while in every country the chance of going to work where a given friend worked rose with the strength of the tie.⁶ In the LinkedIn experiments, too, strong ties drew more job applications, a step short of job moves, in less digital industries.³

Myth

Weak ties work because acquaintances are more helpful than friends.

Fact

In large Facebook studies, a close friend was often the more valuable contact one for one, and acquaintances won on numbers. Their other advantage is reach into circles your friends don't touch.

You don’t have to pick one kind of tie. In the Facebook data, close ties were worth more one for one, and Granovetter himself took it as a natural starting point that they are more motivated to help; weak ties are where most unfamiliar leads come from.¹ When you need a strong push on one specific opportunity, ask someone close. When you need to hear what is out there, widen the circle.

Ideas travel across the same bridges

Contacts who bridge groups carry ideas as well as job news. Ronald Burt, then a sociologist at the University of Chicago’s business school, calls the gaps between groups that rarely talk to each other structural holes, and argues that people whose contacts span those gaps see options others miss, because opinion and practice are more alike within groups than between them.⁷

In his 2004 study of the managers running the supply chain at a large American electronics company, he asked each for one idea to improve it, and two senior managers rated the ideas without knowing who wrote them. Managers whose networks spanned structural holes were more likely to have their ideas judged valuable and less likely to have them dismissed.⁷ It is one company, and the data show associations, so the brokers may differ in other ways too.

Consider a hypothetical operations planner who talks regularly with someone in sales: she hears about customer complaints her own team never sees, and can allow for them in her fix for the ordering process. Teammates who hear what she hears would miss that gap.

Burt also found little follow-through: managers tended to talk ideas over with conveniently close colleagues, and the few who went on to push their ideas were more likely to be those who had discussed them with more distant contacts.⁷ So before you pitch an idea, try it on someone outside your own team, who shares fewer of your team’s assumptions and may see what it has missed.

How to build a network without keeping score

The studies in this guide point to range and upkeep rather than collecting contacts, and none of it requires treating people as leads. Granovetter’s own definition of tie strength includes favors exchanged in both directions, which is a reminder that a tie is a relationship, not a transaction.¹

Start with people you already know. In a 2011 study, Daniel Levin and colleagues asked executives in Executive MBA programs to get back in touch with two people they had not spoken to for at least three years and ask for advice on a work project.⁸ In the executives’ own ratings, the advice from these dormant ties compared well with advice from current contacts, and reconnected former close ties offered both fresh ideas and trust. The executives chose whom to contact, so these were promising ties, not a random draw.

Acquaintances are also worth time for their own sake. Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn found that students felt happier and more like they belonged on days when they interacted with more classmates than usual, an association in daily reports rather than proof of cause.⁹ And when you move on, stay in touch: Granovetter pointed out that every job change links an old network to a new one.¹

The same paper offers a quieter reason to attend industry meetings and conferences. As people move between employers within a well-defined professional or technical field, they leave a web of bridging weak ties behind them, and Granovetter suggested that keeping those ties going may be the most important thing such meetings do.¹ Seen that way, a conference is less a hunt for new contacts than a chance to catch up with the ones you already have.

WiserHours

Keeping weak ties alive

• List acquaintances outside my team, company and field
• Reconnect with one dormant contact this month
• Test my next idea on someone outside my team
• Keep in touch with my old team after a job change
• Ask close ties for backing, acquaintances for news

Find this checklist online:
https://wiserhours.com/networking/granovetter-weak-ties/#checklist-granovetter-weak-ties-habits

The bottom line

Networking works less through close friends than through the acquaintances who link you to other circles, because they hear what your circle doesn’t. Granovetter’s small 1973 study first suggested it, LinkedIn’s far larger experiments largely support it with moderately weak ties doing best, and in Facebook data close friends still mattered more one for one. The useful habit is range and upkeep: stay in light, genuine touch with people across groups, so news from other circles has a way to reach you.