At this point it has become common knowledge: leveraging your social capital will help you on the job market. We hear it from scholars, who illustrate the benefits that job candidates get from referrals; from career counselors, who encourage us to reach out personal contacts at companies where we hope to work; and online, where we are relentlessly reminded to expand our professional networks to advance our careers. To get a job, it often seems, you have to know someone.
Yet leveraging connections during the job search is at odds with another widespread belief, that hiring should be meritocratic, based on candidates’ qualifications rather than their connections. This gives rise to a tension. On the one hand, we want to maximize our chances of getting the job by getting a foot in the door. On the other, we feel committed to the principle of meritocracy and concerned that using connections may shade into nepotism.
How do we justify using connections in the job search, in light of these conflicting beliefs? This is the question we answer in a recent paper using multi-method data from Spain. We develop a new theory of justification based on interviews with young, college educated Spaniards and then test this theory with a survey experiment. Leveraging the advantages of mixed methods research, we illustrate the tension between social capital and meritocracy and illuminate how people resolve this dilemma, with the effect of legitimizing labor market inequalities.
Situational alignment: A theory of justification
It’s no surprise that people often say one thing and do another, but ideals and actions seem strikingly at odds when it comes to job search behaviors. Among the 56 respondents we interviewed, we found pervasive concerns about how using connections might violate the principle of meritocracy. But while respondents were almost universally concerned about meritocracy in the job search, we observed an almost equally universal tendency to use connections to gain an advantage—51 of our 56 respondents reported benefiting from connections or being willing to use their connections in the future.
This led us to explore the process of justification through which these competing beliefs are reconciled. Through inductive analysis of the interviews, we theorize a process of justification that we call situational alignment. To determine whether using connections is legitimate, respondents assess the alignment between the job seeker, the job, and the type of help their connections provided. When these are seen as aligned, the “situation”—the specific context in which connections are used to secure a job—is justifiable; when these are perceived to be misaligned, the situation is condemned as illegitimate.
Specifically, we show that using connections is justified when a situation features specific kinds of alignment. For instance, the job seeker must have qualifications that match the job in question. In addition, their connections must provide help in a way that leaves the evaluation process in place—for instance, by making the candidate submit to an interview or other assessment. Under these circumstances, respondents believe that the requirements of both social capital and meritocracy are fulfilled.
What does this look like in practice? We see situational alignment in action in the case of Luisa, a young woman whose wealthy and powerful father helped her access a job opportunity at a high-status company. Luisa engaged in situational alignment to explain why her use of connections was consistent with her meritocratic commitments:
What my father did was put my resume on the table. He put it on the table and then they did all the interviews. I passed the interviews based on my own merit—the person who first interviewed me is now a close friend, and she tells me, “No, you passed by being competent, and it’s evident.” Because my work has been very, very good… I always give the speech I just gave: the only thing [my dad] did was put my resume on the table. I got the job; my dad didn’t get it for me. And I truly believe it. But there are many times that if you’re the son [of someone important], you’ll get the job for sure [regardless of qualifications].
Luisa justified her use of connections because she viewed herself as having the right qualifications for the job and because her father provided help that did not circumvent the evaluation process—she had to prove herself in the interview. She contrasted her situation with the hypothetical son of a powerful person, who received a job because of his connections alone.
Situational alignment builds on and extends the intuition behind the theory of relational matching, according to which people attempt to match their economic behaviors to specific social relations for whom that behavior is seen as appropriate. For instance, one might pay a babysitter to take care of one’s kids, but not a grandparent. We show that job search situations are governed by strongly held beliefs about social capital and meritocracy, and these are reconciled by aligning not only job-seeking behaviors and interaction partners, but other facets of the situation, such as the nature of the job and the job seeker’s qualifications.
Leveraging mixed methods research
This research took advantage of the complementary strengths of multiple methods. We came to our insight about situational alignment through an inductive analysis of qualitative data. We recruited purposively, sampling along theoretically significant axes of variation. As in any inductive study, the theory emerged from the data, creating an opportunity to leverage alternative methods to explore whether this model would hold more broadly. Do others, beyond our sample, also evaluate the use of connections through a similar process of alignment? And can we demonstrate a causal effect of the key features of the situation on the perceived legitimacy of using connections?
We used an experiment to test these causal effects in a larger sample of respondents. A vignette design allowed us to directly manipulate the key variables of interest in our understanding of a job-seeking situation—the job seeker, job, and type of help provided by connections. Our design involved a simple vignette in which a job seeker applied for a job, received help from a connection, and was offered the job. We randomized 1,536 young Spanish respondents into one of eight conditions: each vignette featured one of two job seekers whose qualifications either match or do not match one of two specific jobs, and one of two types of help, one that circumvented the interview and one that left it in place. We asked respondents to evaluate the legitimacy of the hiring situation they reviewed.
What we found was consistent with our theory. Through regression analysis, we show that respondents were more likely to find the use of connections legitimate when the job seeker, job, and help from connections were aligned. For instance, when all candidates use connections to obtain a job in HR, respondents are more likely to see the situation as legitimate if the job seeker has previous experience in HR and was subjected to an interview, compared to a situation where the job seeker’s previous experience is in food service, or where they circumvented the interview process. The experiment allows us to confirm the model developed from our qualitative analysis.
Seeing our friends with “good eyes”
We also explore how these justifications vary depending on the respondent’s relationship to the job seeker. We show that people are more lenient—more likely to perceive alignment—when discussing their own job-seeking situations and those of their close ties, compared to those of more distant others.
In both the qualitative and experimental data, we find that justifications differ based on the proximity of the respondent to the job seeker. Drawing on Carol Heimer’s insights regarding particularism and universalism, we show that this is because we are more likely to use a beneficial particularism when assessing our friends. We use what we know about our friends—but not about strangers—to more readily perceive alignment.
In addition to accessing more detailed information about the job seeker through those relationships, we show, people are also motivated to find alignment for a friend where they might not for a stranger. As one of our respondents put it, they see their friends with “good eyes” and give them the benefit of the doubt.
Legitimizing inequality in the job search
What do these findings mean for labor market and inequality? We show that respondents from diverse social backgrounds use situational alignment in similar ways to legitimize the use of connections despite concerns about meritocracy. Nonetheless, this process contributes to inequality. This is because situational alignment legitimizes very different outcomes across social class background. People with more privileged upbringings have two advantages: they have access to more valuable social capital through their networks, and they have access to more opportunities to cultivate signals of merit that would make them appear legitimately qualified for higher-status opportunities.
Although people from all class backgrounds use similar strategies to justify the unearned advantages they receive from connections, these justifications legitimize very different outcomes. As a process of justification, situational alignment does not create these inequalities, but it provides a sheen of meritocracy to a deeply unequal labor market.
Authors
Laura Adler is an assistant professor of organizational behavior and sociology (by courtesy) at the Yale School of Management. Her research uses qualitative and experimental methods to examine organizational and labor market inequality with particular emphasis on valuation and pay-setting, beliefs about meritocracy, and the future of work.
Elena Ayala-Hurtado is a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton University. Her research examines how people respond to uncertainty or socioeconomic insecurity, as well as how they navigate conflicting cultural ideals, particularly in relation to work, economic life, and higher education.
Read More
Laura Adler and Elena Ayala-Hurtado. “A Little Help from My Friends? Navigating the Tension Between Social Capital and Meritocracy in the Job Search” in Administrative Science Quarterly 2025. https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392251318
Image: Mohamed_hassan, via Pixabay (CC0)