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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A very good article on the concept of creating talent pools. I used to call this Just-in-time recruiting. How do you identify, nurture, skim the cream of the crop, engage with future potential employees around specific roles like customer service or operations.
Very few companies are willing to be proactive in creating the infrastructure, training, and ask hiring managers to invest a miniscule portion of their time in traditional networking tactics.
Most companies are stuck in the quadrant of "it's urgent-it's important", the classic reactive firefight. If all your doing is being reactive - you'll never move beyond the "let's just get a warm body in that open chair" because "a warm body is better than nobody".
This article lays out some basic ideas of starting to create talent pools for better finding/sourcing of great potential employees.
What's holding you back?
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
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/IMPACT-Hiring-Solutions-HOW-Hire-1819296/about