Making new professional contacts is often essential for boosting your career. Now, a US study suggests that company decision-makers would also benefit from taking a closer look at their employees’ networks.
Given that an organisation’s competitiveness depends, to a large extent, on its ability to attract talent whose professional networks will help expand its potential, researchers set out to determine the extent of benefits that companies could potentially gain from these connections.
To achieve this, they catalogued the business relationships of over nine million employees working for 7,715 US companies in 19 different sectors. Collectively, these employees had made two billion connections on LinkedIn, the leading professional network.
Drawing on this massive database, the experts found that the most “connected” companies – that is, those employing individuals with a substantial network – outperform others: they tend to be more innovative than those whose workers have made fewer professional connections over the course of their career.
Specifically, companies with “connected” workforces invest more in research and development than their competitors. In the long term, this enables them to be awarded more patents.
“We found that companies that are more connected are having a bigger impact; the innovation they produce is more successful in the marketplace,” co-author Frank Nagle explained.
He and his colleagues also noted that some companies make use of their employees’ networks more than others. Examples include Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, IBM, General Motors, Target, and Pfizer.
Generally speaking, companies in the manufacturing, information and finance/insurance sectors are the most highly connected. But contrary to what you might assume, firms with hundreds of thousands of employees are not necessarily better off than some SMEs.
“There are big companies that are not well connected, and there are small companies that are well connected and central to the network,” Nagle observed.
The findings suggest that recruiters would benefit to look beyond diplomas and even CVs during the hiring process. “Already in some jobs such as sales or higher-level management, managers may think about how well-connected you are. Our work now shows this might be a consideration for a broader set of jobs,” Nagle concluded.