How will you find your next job? Everyone wants a better strategy than simply clicking on an endless blur of hiring notices. A fresh study by LinkedIn highlights 10 types of careers where a strong personal network of contacts may pay off the most.
In a blog post published today, data analytics specialist Peter Rigano examined the range of LinkedIn contacts held by each member of the social network that got a new job in October 2014. His objective: to see what percentage of them -- at least six months before switching jobs -- had established at least one connection with an employee or manager of the company that eventually hired them.
On average, he found, 16% of all hiring involved job candidates with well-established connections into their new employer. In some cases, Rigano writes, those connections may have led to formal job referrals. In other cases, candidates may simply have learned about job openings informally, through their professional network of friends, acquaintances and other contacts.
Rigano's analysis unearthed some wide differences among industries, in terms of how common it is for new hires to have existing contacts with their prospective employers. The most tightly networked fields, according to LinkedIn data, include computer games, computer and network security, venture capital/private equity and political organizations. As the table below shows, all of these fields did at least 26% of their hiring from existing employee networks.
At the other end of the spectrum, industries such as restaurants, freight delivery, medical practice and luxury goods conducted less than 10% of their hiring from existing employee networks, according to LinkedIn's data.
From what I've seen of game development, management consulting and private equity, LinkedIn's suggestion that these are highly clubby, close-knot fields is probably correct. LinkedIn's roster of more than 300 million users is famously comprehensive for such knowledge-intensive, high-profile fields.
But the full picture on restaurants and medical practices may be more complex. Such domains aren't traditionally thought of as hotbeds of LinkedIn activity. It may be that people in those fields rely significantly on their networks of work contacts to help them find jobs, too. The low scores could reflect, at least in part, a lower percentage of such workers' networks that are found within LinkedIn's databases.
All the same, as Rigano points out, highly specialized technical industries are looking for people with uncommon skills, and a good way to find such people is to tap into recommendations by existing employees. Something similar is at work in relationship-driven professions such as finance and politics, where companies like to tap into employees' existing networks to find people who are good at "closing deals and winning clients."
