In today’s high-tech economy, it’s not just quant skills and R&D know-how that confer competitive advantage. A new study mapped LinkedIn connections among firms woven out of 2 billion individual employee relationships at 7,715 public US companies representing 19 industries. The researchers found that companies whose real-world employee connections put them at the center of their professional communities performed better than peer companies whose workforces were less well-connected and, as a result, on the periphery of the same community. In that sense, LinkedIn connections become a proxy for real-world connections, and potentially a tool for differentiating the potential contributions of job candidates.“Managers, when they hire somebody, know to look for many different qualities. Are these connections more important if you are somebody in sales versus someone in research?”[This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.]

Source: Forbes November 24, 2023 19:36 UTC