 I try my best to network with other engineers, but they always run away before I can get the other side of the Cat5 plugged in. In the 70s, less than 5% of the musicians in the top 5 symphonic orchestras in the United States were women. It was suggested that maybe some unconscious bias might be responsible for that weird discrepancy, so those orchestras implemented a new blind audition policy, not allowing the judges to see who was auditioning until after they'd already made their decision. That simple change resulted in a 25% increase in the representation of women in those orchestras by 1997. Either there was a sudden spike in women's musical ability over those 20 years, or before the blind audition process was implemented, those orchestras were hiring technically inferior musicians based solely on their gender. That's a little bit frustrating, partially because it violates a commonly held intuition about hiring and merit, that the person who should get a job is the best person for that job. Not the best male person, not the best old person, not the best big person, the single person who will execute the duties of their position better than anyone else. If the best tubist is a small, young woman, then that's who should be on tuba. That idea is partially practical and partially moral. Practically, if you're running an orchestra or a business or a government, you want the widest possible pool of candidates to choose from, so you can make sure that you're getting the very best one, and irrational selection criteria interfere with that. Morally, it seems fundamentally wrong to allow things that don't have any bearing on a job to affect a hiring decision. Nepotism, cronyism, discrimination based on age or sex or race or religion, we tend to think that these things aren't okay. Business networking, the practice of deliberately cultivating relationships with people in strategic positions explicitly for the purpose of furthering one's career, is hyped by many people as an essential part of the hiring process, and the data seemed to support that idea. According to this 2015 study, almost half of all employees only found their job because someone in their social network told them about it, and those people get paid 22% more on average than people who use more formal means, like internet job sites. On its face, that seems like it violates the ideal of merit-based hiring practices. We want the best person to get a job, not the best person who the hiring manager bumped into at a trade show, or the best person who was recommended by a drinking buddy at the HR guy. What gives? Well, there are several concepts commonly cited in defense of networking as an appropriate tool for finding and securing jobs. Let's examine them closely and see if they hold water. First, maybe meritocracy isn't the best standard to begin with. If a talented professional musician is denied a spot in an orchestra solely because she's a woman, okay, fine, that's not cool. But how far back the chain of causality are we willing to chase someone's qualifications? If a poor violist just can't afford a really nice instrument yet, should she get cut from the list? What about someone who isn't from the area, who had to take a red-eye flight in and isn't well-rested for the audition? Also, it's not like the bias against women is restricted to just these symphonies. Colleges and conservatories without blind auditions probably turn away numerous excellent musicians because of their gender. Musicians who otherwise would have had the chance to further hone their skills and beat down any competition technically. Is it fair to just ignore that advantage? This is the justice angle. Until we found a way to undo all of the harm caused by our implicit cultural biases, people's choices and opportunities have been limited from square one by forces beyond their control. In that sense, blind meritocracy might be an instrument of injustice. If we just go by what people can do right now and overlook all of the obstacles that they've had to overcome to get where they are, we're not really selecting the best person for the job anyways. We're selecting the best person who isn't poor or from the wrong state or any number of other factors that don't really have any effect on how good they would be in that job given an opportunity. But even if we're on the side of justice over equality here, that doesn't imply that networking is an instrument of fairness. It's not like these cultural biases are less pervasive in social interactions. If anything, the opposite is true. I'm going to focus on white people here because they represent 82% of managers in the United States, people who are ostensibly in charge of hiring. According to a study by the Public Religion Research Institute, the average white person has a social circle that is composed of 91% other white people. 75% of white people in the US have no minority representation in their social circles at all. Statistics for other ethnicities are slightly less homogeneous. 83% for black people, 64% for people of Hispanic descent. If we're interested in trying to offset the disadvantage caused by being part of a certain racial demographic, networking is definitely not the way to go here. Okay, let's try a different angle. Maybe networking doesn't actually conflict with the ideal of barit-based hiring practices in the first place. After all, communication and forming relationships are valuable skills. Why would it be wrong to show a preference for people who can get their resume into the right hands? Well, before we get into the meat at that idea, there's a sort of circular justification that we should probably try to avoid from the outset. Just because networking is currently important for succeeding in a career, doesn't imply that it's necessarily important. If an exceptionally talented musician isn't particularly outgoing, but is still easy to work with and polite and decent at communication, it doesn't really make any sense to suggest that they shouldn't get a job because some other musician is better at making friends with the right kind of people to get an audition. It's definitely a valuable skill for certain types of jobs. Positions which require contacting and influencing key players should lean towards people who can do that effectively. That's not half of all jobs, though. But perhaps more importantly, even if networking is a demonstration of some sort of relevant skill, it sort of undermines the whole point of having a hiring process to begin with. Imagine this. You've applied to a position. You've tailored your resume and cover letter for that position. You've filled out a carefully sterilized online form about your qualifications and experience. You've gone through two rounds of email questions. You got the call, got your suit pressed and a haircut, went into the lobby, sat down and started talking to one of the other applicants. How do you hear about this job? Oh, Kathy and I go bowling together on the weekends and she mentioned that she needed a good IT guy. You'll love her. She's a real cool person. Despite all that rigmarole of a careful, even-handed procedure to select the best possible candidates objectively, the deck is pretty clearly stacked against you from the get-go. How much better do you have to sell yourself and your qualifications in a 30-minute meeting to trump however long these two have been bowling together? Why even go through all that trouble in the first place? If the competition was always going to be who can be friends with the hiring manager before the interview? Why even ask for resumes? The idea here is that the whole point of systematic hiring practices is to mitigate bias and favoritism, to use a process to select the best possible candidate from a pool where nobody gets special treatment. If networking is part of that equation, if candidates are allowed to ingratiate themselves to decision makers before the process has even begun, it's a little silly to go to such great lengths to provide the illusion of an even playing field. To me, it seems like these defenses of networking don't really stand to inspection. If we accept the idea that hiring should be based on merit, that nobody should have trouble getting a job just because they're overweight or Indian or Christian or whatever, then business networking as a tool for career advancement isn't just impractical, it also seems unethical on several levels. So why do people put up with it? Why is it the de facto standard in almost any industry you can think of? Well, because hiring people is really, really hard. The internet and globalization have expanded the pool of potential candidates for any opening to insane proportions. According to a 2013 survey of HR managers, the average corporate job opening receives 250 resumes. Every one of those resumes is a potential roll of the dice, with money and time loss if they end up not working out. In that environment, managers are desperate for any information they can use to slim down that stack by any means necessary. Don't like the font? Trash. Weird name? Trash. Can't recommend it by my brother-in-law. Oh, thank God. Let's look at this one. Relying on heuristics, like networking ability to narrow the pool of applicants quickly, makes the signal-to-noise ratio much higher without much effort. Unfortunately, by tolerating or even fostering it as a crutch to deal with the inadequacies of a formal hiring process, managers are kind of shooting themselves in the foot. Not only are we exacerbating the biases which stagnate economic mobility and all the other moral issues that we've talked about, but also there's probably a huge, largely untapped resource of people who just don't network or aren't good at it. People who would otherwise be crushing it in jobs which don't really require someone to be good at small talk. So how on earth do we fix this? Well, if a $5 black curtain can make that much of a difference in orchestral auditions, maybe some slightly more sophisticated tools could help make formal hiring processes more attractive for employers. There are some government contractors which are required by law to list vacant positions for some amount of time before hiring. Even if networking ultimately gets someone onto their shortlist, they have to at least go through the motions of being even-handed. Hell, while they're waiting, maybe they could look at some resumes. There are certain techniques which have been demonstrated to mitigate bias in hiring to some degree. For example, structured interviews which pose the same set of questions to all potential applicants help the interviewer focus more on what's actually necessary for the job and less on how chatty they can be with the new database maintenance specialist. Also, we live in a time of big data in AI. There's evidence that algorithms aren't free from bias, but we can probably do better than, hey, Carol, I know a guy who would be great for this job. Numerous companies have developed fully automated software suites designed to pare down the avalanche of resumes for any given position to the best 2% to 3% of applicants. That greatly reduces the cost of searching for candidates through more formal and more fair channels. Maybe in 10 years or so, I'll see AI-driven Google AdSense banners for my dream job. Of course, in 25 years or so, the AI will have taken my job, but I'll probably be too busy working in the silicon mines to worry about it. How do you think we might move away from the unethical crutch of business networking? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share. And don't stop thumping.