Jason Alba on his blog raised the question of whether LinkedIn was nothing more than Job Board 2.0 - perhaps picking up a little from where Monster and Careebuilder left off.
Here is the comment I posted on his blog:
Here’s my perspective as a executive recruiter, speaker, author on the subject of hiring, and social networking expert/trainer.
The job board concept of LinkedIn is mistaken. Their job board is no more effective than traditional job boards like Monster or Careerbuilder.
What is powerful is the foundation of their site – networking. It used to be “back in the day” when I was recruiting 25 years ago, 99% of all candidate placements came from a second to third level referral. Rarely would the first person contacted be the person who got the job.
My search work today is 10X more effective because I can leverage interactions and referrals on LinkedIn at scale that was unimaginable a few years ago.
LinkedIn leverages this concept for recruiters, sales professionals, and anyone else attempting to reach someone – connections allowing warm-to-hot referrals instead of cold calls.
Seeing LinkedIn as a job board is a waste of time. Not using LinkedIn as a networking tool is a waste of time.
Here’s where I see LinkedIn evolving:
It’s moving from simply a networking tool for connecting and gaining referrals to content publishing and engaging with your network through groups, status updates, great content, and questions/answers. The better LinkedIn does with this “engagement” and “content marketing” element, the more powerful the tool will become.
Barry Deutsch
IMPACT Hiring Solutions HIRE and RETAIN Top Talent Blog
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Many recruiters (and software vendors) are claiming that someone's digital footprint on Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Facebook can reveal interesting things about a candidate. I DISAGREE!
The only exception is for those in the on-line world where activity, profiles, and connections indicate their level of understanding, use, and sophistication of using on-line tools.
The problem is that most individuals beyond those in the on-line space are so new to social media tools - that the lack of significant presence is NOT yet a negative. In 3-4 years when social media use by business professionals becomes more common, then the lack of using these sites/tools might be viewed as a negative.
Most companies are struggling still to figure out how to use the most basic elements of social media for recruiting - forget about using sophisticated tools.
Barry Deutsch
IMPACT Hiring Solutions HIRE and RETAIN Top Talent
http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/blog
Do you have a FREE Copy of our best selling e-book on how to hire and retain top talent?
http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/hiring-managers/hiring-products/our-award-winning-book/a-digital-ebook-version
Learn how your success depends on the quality of the team you build and keep by joining us in our LinkedIn Discussion Group on hiring and retaining top talent
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