Creating Connections For the Disadvantaged : Networks and Labor Market Intermediaries at the Hiring Interface ©

All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission, provided that full credit including © notice is given to the source. Abstract Scholars interested in race inequality have been particularly attracted to network accounts of the stratifying effects of social networks in the labor market. A recurring theme in policy‐oriented research on poverty is that institutional connections can be engineered to create connections between job seekers and employers in ways that parallel social network processes. Yet, there has been little empirical research on how such linkages work across the various steps of the recruitment, screening, and hiring process. We examine how labor market intermediaries can serve as functional substitutes for social network processes for disadvantaged workers. Consistent with policy arguments about the desirability of creating connections to employers, applicants who are connected to this employer via formal labor market intermediaries exhibit a number of the advantages experienced by those applying to the firm via social network ties. Across the two stages of the hiring process, the net result is that applicants with such " created connections " are more likely to be offered jobs, and ultimately hired than other groups of applicants. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for research on labor market intermediation and other forms of brokerage and the feasibility of policy efforts to " create connections " in the labor market. There is by now a rich tradition of research on the role of networks in job‐person matching processes. Scholars interested in race and gender inequality have been particularly attracted to network accounts of the stratifying effects of social networks in the labor market (for a recent review of the role of networks and race in the labor market, see Fernandez and Fernandez‐Mateo 2006; for a review of gender and labor market networks, see Fernandez and Sosa 2005). Scholars interested in poverty, too, have made research on networks a key research Another literature concerned with understanding how persons and jobs are matched is the scholarship on formal labor market intermediaries (e. the labor market, studies of labor market intermediaries have also examined the stratifying consequences of labor market intermediation (e.g., Fernandez‐Mateo 2009; Vosko 2000). As with the study of social networks in labor markets, students of poverty have also been examining how labor market intermediaries can help the plight of poor and disadvantaged …