One day I sat on a panel for economics students for other students discussing how we got our internships. I was chatting with one of the girls prior to the panel on how she had gotten her job at Boeing. I told her that when I had gotten my internship, I had reached out to the recruiter through a contact I had known. Her story was slightly different. She explained that she was adamently against using connections to get a job, she wanted to get jobs based on her own merit and hard work.
The girls aunt had work for Boeing and she knew she wanted to work there. The opportunity to use her aunt as leverage to get the job is clear: reach out and ask her if she knows anyone that can help her get the job; it is an easy choice to help you stand out above other candidates who may be equally if not more qualified, but she didn't do that. Instead she attended career fairs, info nights, and even drove up to Chicago to attend on eof their expos. She wanted to get the job on her own, not leverage what was easy.
The girl ended up getting the job and never even told her aunt she worked there until the end of the summer internship so she could make connections at the company on her own, be fairly evaluated, and not always be thought of as "_________'s niece".
From her experience, I thought alot about opportunism within getting a job and how people do that and I tried to seperate when I think leveraging connections is ethical vs. unethical. While she never involved her aunt, I don't always think it is necessary. In this situation I broke it down in to my opinion of ethical and unethical opportunism which I have described below for this situation.
- Unethical Opportunism from Leveraging Connections: If you use connections because your own merit/ skill set would not get you the job on your own. If there is no way you would directly get the job on your own, using a connection to get you the job is unethical opportunism because you are taking the opportunity from a qualified candidate, you are putting the organization at a disadvantage from hiring a less qualified individual that does not provide as much contribution to the organization, and it is causing inefficiency by not having the best inputs (labor) to produce outputs (organizational capital).
- Ethical Opportunism for Leveraging Connections: This is if you use your connections to help you network because you are a qualified candidate and using the connections/networks you have built helps you stand out among a large talent pool. You would have been able to get the job on your own, but this networking helps you stand out from the rest to develop a competitive advantage over individuals.
While I think this does a good job of summarizing what ethical/unethical opportunism is in this situation, like any economic scenario there is a level of uncertainty. Here this occurs in measuring of qualification: how do you know if you are qualified/unqualified for the position? If you chose to leverage a connection and you are unqualified how would you know if you get the job? If you don't leverage a connection and you are qualified how would you know if you didn't get the job? How can you settle differing perspectives of qualifications? Maybe some companies prefer people that already have networks, how do you eliminate that variable? There is always some level of uncertainty that blurs the clear division of unethical and ethical opportunism.
I'm reading and commenting on this Monday morning. The post came in yesterday after I was done commenting on other blog posts. This time, you are getting the benefit of the doubt. Please in the future get the post done earlier.
ReplyDeleteOn your analysis of what is ethical and what not, I think you might consider this by performance in the job afterward. If the person under performs what co-workers and the supervisor expects and if it is known that the person got the job because of personal connections, then that will be viewed as nepotism and create resentment in the office.
It seems possible, however, that the person might be good at the job but wouldn't get the position without the connections. In that case, what you have described as unethical might not be.
The question is how one would know. If you want something, you're inclined to believe you will be good at it. Those prior beliefs need not be accurate and there is no way to test the proposition without actually doing it. But some people are more self-deluded than others.
In particular, somebody who is a late bloomer may find opportunities closed off, while somebody who is an early bloomer but who has started to burn out may have lots of opportunities. The late bloomer might then benefit from the personal network because there is a kind of market failure otherwise.
The idea was that your performance was an indicator as to if you leveraged connections in a way of nepotism. Your performance would be judged in terms of evaluated by the company/ position would judge you. However, you bring up a point that the performance evaluation may also be skewed. For example. If I am the daughter of the CFO, my performance may not be evaluated as harshly as someone without high stakeholders>
ReplyDeleteThe market failure point you bring up is an interesting one. Late bloomers can definitely benefit from building a network, but the goal of this post was to put that networks are valuable only if performance meets standards. It would be a loss in productivity for an organization to bring in an individual who had a strong network but lacking qualifications versus someone with a weak network but strong qualifications. I think the best indicator of productivity and efficiency comes from the performance that is incubated as a result of onboarding.