I met Nathalie Chauvac a conference during which we were involved on social networks and employment at the IEP of Toulouse, in December.

Nathalie is currently a researcher and doctoral candidate in sociology has achieved a great deal of research on employment and social networks (Thesis).

In this context, it broadcasts an internet questionnaire intended for employees: The objective is to understand how you found your job.

Thank you for taking a few minutes to answer some questions. Of course, if you participate, you will receive the answers in this study.

• What is known about the hiring

17 people active in 100 situations change over the job each year. This may mean they change employer, school, job, they lose their job or they find one when they were unemployed. These transitions have increased since they concerned only 12% of the workforce 74-75.

The mobility rate varies by industry professionals, business size, skill level, age or gender. It is related to the type of contract employees and comes in a case of two periods of unemployment (one of 5 thirty years ago).
The hiring is an important time for businesses and employees. Louis Chauvel and showed scars or scars that can leave the modes of access to employment, the impact they can have on the trajectories of employees. For example, he studied the differences in the conditions of entry into working life of young and analyzed the consequences of access more or less rapid employment of a first contract more or less related to the initial training more or less precarious. Having found a job before he left before or after a long period of unemployment has the same impact on the subsequent career, the relationship with the employer. For a company, make the right choices, employ a person who will allow optimum operation of a service or sector is a long term investment. But this time, this sequence is unknown.
We know little about how workers find jobs. In economics, it assumes a market that is balanced or not based on investment in employee training and wages offered by firms or segmented markets more or less waterproof. In sociology, the work characteristics have been studied, the impact of unemployment on individuals but also little work concerning this particular moment is called recruitment. What does it specifically for an employer and an employee meet? How do they know of a possible collaboration, the existence of skills or proposed position?

• Hiring is a social

The work of Mark S. Granovetter in 1974 have shown the benefits of the sociological approach in this area. They tended to prove that employees have essentially mobilized their personal or professional networks to access information on jobs available and that links low-skilled (professionals) were more effective than strong ties (strong) to the access to better jobs than those previously occupied. Other studies have been conducted in this field in Japan, the U.S., Germany, China confirming and detailing the contributions of Mark S. Granovetter.
In France, Michel Forse left the employment survey by INSEE to confirm that the mobilization of networks was much the easiest way to find a job in France especially in backgrounds. Dubernet Anne Chantal Hardy was, she interested in hiring as a social fact in the sense of Mauss that is to say a time when fully realized representations of people involved, the discrimination they induce.

• Networks are essential but not sufficient

According to the INSEE survey, only one third of people thought the network had played a leading role in securing a job (56% of respondents in the United States by Granovetter).
This percentage is quite low considering that all individuals are inserted in a social network more or less dense and extensive, and that those who have already worked by definition a professional network. Why all the employees they do their networks to find a job? The preliminary investigation reveals three types of responses. The use of networks can be impossible, unthinkable or unproductive.
The use of networks is impossible for someone who wants to keep its confidential approach (person on the job not wanting to inform his employer of his desire to leave) or for someone who has been dismissed for misconduct or any other reason the "toasting" with his professional entourage.
It is unthinkable in the context of competitions such recruitment in the public service or in circumstances where the use of networks could be considered as a means to pressure. In fact, we see that the formal opposition of individuals to use such means to double the use of networks to obtain information or have an idea of possible use. But this use is limited to a flow of information.
Finally, the use of networks may be sufficiently productive in a number of cases that will interest us particularly. One might think that some people do not have "good" network to be kept informed of employment opportunities that may affect them or to make their applications either because they have never had a chance to contacts professionals (young), or because they have changed their place of work or job type.
In this case, there would still pass through networks but with longer chains, and unemployment would be the only result of poor access to networks. In fact, we must examine the content of the employment relationship to understand what is in use or not social networks.

• The relationship of hiring a particular social relationship

What is at stake in the employment relationship can be considered from a purely mechanical point of view: an employer and employee to assess their potential opportunity to work together with the competences required for the position and acquired by the employee, conditions work proposed by the one sought by the other.
This analysis is accurate but it has at least two shortcomings: first it ignores the way people have been linked and the impact this may have on the way will build employment, secondly it removes all the social dimension of the relationship is being created.
Each person comes with its own representations, identity constructed through membership in several social circles, his own path that will project onto the other. The employment relationship is a relationship of subordination, and these are representations of the employer will prevail, in concrete example in the definition of the job. In fact, the employment relationship is a sequence of re-cognition of the other that well beyond the strict knowledge or skills necessary to fill a position is to mobilize all social affiliations of persons involved.
Specifically, it explains as shown Gilles Lazuech about the employability of young graduates of engineering schools and business that "diploma equal to the social proximity with the employer may be decisive in a game seduction that dare not speak its name, but where the future is recruited to both satisfy and please. This social proximity is required to activate even weak social ties.
One can speculate that it is having in common outside the strict skills or knowledge that allows the relationship to be mobilized for a job. This is sometimes a lack of closeness that would make inoperative networks and therefore need the intervention of mediation devices that are just disseminators of information or intermediary agents. This also explains the paradox noted by Granovetter in the U.S.: can coexist in the same geographical area of occupations under pressure and people who are qualified but not hired by employers.

• What one wants to know

Since 2006, two working methods have enabled us to analyze the phenomena of employment: an analysis of employment surveys from INSEE and OFER (DARES) and qualitative survey of land in order to reconstruct the stories of hiring employees serving. Summary results of these investigations led to identify several elements that are causing the draft questionnaire.

Employees generally mobilize more resources for finding a job: they can view offers, search for addresses within a business directory, send a resume or make a bid on a site, tell a close relationship which is now etc.. In many cases, the articulation of a set of resources that will help get to build the relationship of employment.
Employers are not always aware of all these steps and see that somehow the tip of the iceberg: the application sent to the company, possibly the intervention of an employee in place.

In access to employment networks can play a positive or negative because they are the source of a bias that can be a value (confidence due to the third mediation) or an obstacle (no confidence because of this mediation).

Stories of access to employment which succeed for the same person or same enterprise are interdependent. An employer or an employee build their employment relations by taking into account the success or failure of previous sequences but also the culture of their background, their professional world.

Field surveys and analysis of secondary data do not establish a typology of stories based on employment sectors, age, gender, occupations. Quantitative methods used to mobilize much time as they are to recover from open interviews sequences hiring. It is not possible to expand sufficiently to benefit from statistically relevant elements for types crossed with social determinants.

The aim of the survey questionnaire will be to reach a large labor force to highlight the types of stories related to recruitment age, gender, profession.

It is further the employment survey of the INSEE OFER or limiting a term answers to the question on how people found their jobs but also get more information on the type of relations or intermediate mobilized in access to employment, and the means used in vain.
This survey is conducted as part of a sociology thesis conducted under the direction of Michel Grossetti, researcher in social networks, economic sociology and director of markets and the ESRC, research laboratory attached to LISST - CNRS, part University of Mirail. It relies on the expertise acquired by researchers in this laboratory including in the field of social networks, markets, corporate collaborations.

• To go further

Reply to this questionnaire and distribute it around you is important to better understand how to build the relationship of employment. If it make you want to know more and know the results of this survey, you can tell the end of the questionnaire your details and receive an individual review article. If you have any questions or additional comments on this topic, you can also contact us directly by mail or through the site where you found the link for the questionnaire.

To learn more about the authors cited here is a short bibliography:

Amossé Thomas, "Internal or external, two faces of occupational mobility,
INSEE Première, No. 921, September 2003
Bessy C. and E. Marchal, "The role of networks and the market in recruitment. Business Survey ", French Review of Socio-Economics 2009 / 1, No. 3, p. 121-146.
Louis Chauvel, "The destiny of generations, the social bond, PUF, 2002.
Anne Dubern t-Hardy, 1996, "The selection of qualities in hiring. A staging of the social value ", Formation Emploi, No. 54.
Yannick Foundry, "Internet recruitment and job search: an introduction?" La Revue de l'IRES, special issue "Internet recruitment and job search.
Michel Forse., 1997, "Social Capital and Jobs," Annee sociologique, Vol. 47, No. 1, p. 143-181.
ark Granovetter, 2008, "Economic sociology", Postscript and translation by Isabelle This Saint-Jean, Preface by Jean-Louis Laville, Seuil.
Michel Grossetti, "Social Networks and mediation resources in the economy," in "Show and Market: Harrison White and new economic sociology", Science Society, No. 73, February 2008.
Gilles Lazuech, "Recruit, to be recruited. The professional integration of young
Graduate School of Engineering and Commerce, Education Jobs No. 85, January March
2004.
Marcel Mauss, "Essai sur le don. Form and reason for exchange in archaic societies (1925), Introduction to Florence Weber, Quadriga / Presses Universitaires de France, 2007

To learn more about the lab LISST-Cers and its work http://w3.cers.univ-tlse2.fr/

Written by Nathalie Chauvac, PhD student in sociology
LISST CNRS (UMR 5193)
Université Toulouse le Mirail

http://w3.mdr.univ-tlse2.fr/limesurvey/index.php?sid=62388&lang=fr