LinkedIn, Recruiters, and LinkedIn
March 29th, 2010 | by Jason Alba |I read a great post with insightful comments about recruiters using LinkedIn. It is titled LinkedIn – Just How Good is it?, written by Keith Robinson. Some of the interest lines:
“when we use LinkedIn we find that at least 20% of LinkedIn profiles are essentially defunct…”
“at least 40% of their premium ‘inmail’ messages are not read by the intended recipients within a week of being sent.”
“[people] build their profile and wait to be found rather than use it as a networking tool.”
“whilst 45% of candidates say they regularly use LinkedIn, only 5% have actively responded to a job advert placed on social media sites like LinkedIn.”
“when we asked candidates to indicate how they would go about searching for their next jobs, hardly any said they would apply for jobs via social media sites.” I agree, since that is not the purpose or design of a social tool…
“so the lines seem to be clearly drawn, with social media being a means of researching firms and allowing oneself to be seen by headhunters… whilst job boards remain the places where candidates will actively head to seek out a new job.” I DISAGREE.
Read the comments for insights from recruiters.
In the other corner we have an article by Jessi Hempel on CNN Money/Fortune titled How LinkedIn will fire up your career. That is a long but insightful article about LinkedIn and using it as a career development tool. It is interesting to read that Accenture plans to hire 50k jobs, apparently 40% of them coming from social media. That is 20,000 people hired from social media… that’s amazing. The head of global recruiting, John Campagnino, says “This is the future of recruiting for our company.”
I disagree how the article says “Facebook is for fun. Tweets have a short shelf life. If you’re serious about managing your career, the only social site that really matters is LinkedIn.” Using just one site is a mistake, I think…. don’t discount other sites where you might encounter hiring managers, HR, recruiters, etc.
Go read the Fortune article… it provides a seemingly biased but optimistic picture of why and how LinkedIn SHOULD be a part of your career management strategy. It’s interesting to contrast the two perspectives – what camp do you fall in?
