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Introduction: Employment and the achieving a desirable job is considered to be the most basic needs of a society. Unemployment has been considered as a destructive social, economic and cultural phenomenon and its elimination has always been one of the main concerns of officials. One of the important issues in the Iranian society is the unemployment of educated people in all academic fields. Information and statistics show the failure of  well-educated young people to find a job. However, a group of students has succeeded in finding a job. This study, by relying on the theory of neoclassical scholars in economics and the theorists of social relations network in sociology, explains how these individuals find their desirable job.
Method: This research was a survey and its population included students of Kharazmi University in three levels of undergraduate, postgraduate and PhD at Karaj and Tehran branches. Data were collected through a questionnaire with a sample size of 544 people.
Findings: The informal relationships (social relations network) play a much larger role than the official paths of job search in student employment. Strong social relationships in comparison to weak social relationships, lead to more employment and academic relationships play a very limited role in student employment. Moreover, the findings showed that students from urban areas used social relations network more than students from rural areas and students whose parents had higher education used the social relations network for employment more than students whose parents had lower education.
Discussion: Employed students have mostly found their jobs through informal relationships and formal job search paths have little effect on student employment. In other words, official job search channels such as recruitment agencies, official job placement sites and job advertisements have not played a significant role in student employment. Only 22.4% of the students indicated that they had found their job through official job search channels, while 77.6% of the students found their job through informal relationships. The social relations network helps people to meet specific needs such as employment. In other words, employment or lack of employment depends largely on the social relations network of individuals. The findings of this study showed that extensive interaction among individuals for obtaining resources and social and economic opportunities is an important issue in economic sociology studies. Considering the results of this study, it can be concluded that the network of social relations is effective in analyzing the labor market in Iran.

Keywords: job search, social relations networks, formal and informal relations, weak and strong social relations.

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