Personal connections have always been used as an advantage for people seeking employment.
In a recent study, conducted over a five-year period, it was found that 50 to 80 percent of all jobs are filled through networking, with some 70 percent of available jobs not even posted on public platforms to begin with.
Over 500,000 respondents were from the Middle East and North Africa region, around 150,000 of which are from the UAE. The total sample size was 19.5 million globally.
Although Gulf economies are growing and hiring rates are up, jobseekers usually end up having to use a personal connection to ultimately land an opportunity.
But these personal connections, or what some in the region would colloquially refer to as “wasta” (literally translates to medium in English), are coloured differently by the study conducted by Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and LinkedIn.
Weak ties, the researcher said, are more likely to lead to a job opportunity than a strong one, or that “an acquaintance is twice more likely to lead to a job opportunity than a close friend,” a career expert at LinkedIn, told Arabian Business.
It is helpful to reach out to people beyond your immediate friends and colleagues when looking for a job, Stanford professor Erik Brynjolfsson, who led the large-scale experimental research, said.
This provides a rather new perspective about jobseeking trends in both mature and emerging economies, which would usually include nepotism in one form or another.
The study was based on the “strength of weak ties,” which academics describe as one of the most influential social theories of the last century. The theory suggests that arms-length relationships, or weak ties, are more beneficial for employment opportunities, promotions, and wages.
Although the idea has been existing for a while, previous studies on it were not reliable enough to pin down the effects of weak and strong ties in jobseeking, according to a report on Stanford’s website.
This study comes as Gulf economies ramp up hiring activities on the back of rapid post-pandemic recovery. In the UAE, hiring rates were up by 8.2 percent in August this year compared to the same period in 2021.
In part because of how Covid-19 changed the way people live and work, eight out of 10 employees in the UAE are looking to change jobs in the next few months.
This active labour mobility could serve as another litmus test for the impact of “wasta” in the region’s job market – although given the LinkedIn data about recruitment, personal connections would seem to remain as an important element in finding one’s dream job.
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