LinkedIn is the 'people dashboard' for the media industry. And it was that way long before the big IPO of 2011. Recruiters and the general digital media public have known this for years. Most of my media colleagues were among the first half million users. (I was number 250,000 and change, seven+ years ago). And now there are more than 120 million!
So here are a few true observations (and cautionary tales) from the LinkedIn trenches:
1 - Everyone's looking at everyone's profile. Recruiters do it. Our clients do it. Friends do it. Clients and recruiters and friends look at the profiles together when they're on the phone. It's like a virtual meet-up (well, not really). Anyone with a paid account can see who's looking at their profiles and when. Sometimes when interviewing with this recruiter, candidates have been known to mention that they've seen that the hiring exec in question has been browsing their profile (even before they're on the official list of candidates for consideration). It's a frenzy. It's the age of transparency in overdrive.
IMPLICATION FOR JOB SEEKERS: Keep your profile up to date. Make sure it's a good reflection of your professional self.
IMPLICATION FOR RECRUITERS AND HIRING EXECS: Manage your settings. If you are constantly data mining for candidates or checking out your competitors' executives, hurry up and change your privacy control settings so you can preserve your anonymity!
2 - If you're not on LinkedIn, you don't exist. This is a corollary that flows from the above observation. In my media recruiting world, there are really only four excuses for not being on LinkedIn: a) you're so well known and famous that you feel a listing is superfluous to your brand identity and you think you're way above the fray; b) you're very private and relatively content with your station in life and don't want to wade into the fray; (c) you have an overblown fear of unwanted emails and intrusions; or d) you just don't get it. Among these, (a) is just plain ego; (b)may raise some concerns; (c) is a lazy and uninformed excuse. But you want to avoid (d) at all costs!
CAUTIONARY TALE: I once had a very digitally-savvy client running a very digitally-driven business who wasn't on LinkedIn. Candidates for his management job were puzzled by this and asked me about it. So I asked him to please go add his profile, if only to help me with marketing the role, and happily he did it that day.
IMPLICATION FOR ALL: Get on LinkedIn if you want to 'exist' in a professional networking sense and showcase your career experience.
3 - Having a poor profile or a multiplicity of profiles may be worse than having none. True case in point: A client in an entrepreneurial digital media company was immediately dubious about an experienced candidate's viability when he couldn't find him on LinkedIn ('why isn't he there if he's really in this industry?') When it was pointed out that in fact he was there (under a variant name spelling), with 500+ contacts, said client noticed that the candidate actually had two separate profiles, one that was active and one had been left to wither with few connections. He was then dismissive that the candidate lacked social networking savvy because he hadn't known how to delete the original one. Either way, the candidate struck out.
IMPLICATION: is obvious
4- Bosses know when their employees are on a job search simply by the activity on their LinkedIn feeds. Joining more groups, frequently updating your profile, connecting to lots of new people all of a sudden (INCLUDING executive recruiters) - all very overt signs. I've had clients tell me that they know their direct reports are looking because of what they see on LinkedIn.
IMPLICATION FOR EMPLOYED JOB SEEKERS: Don't connect to your boss or your boss' boss (or quietly disconnect behind the scenes - they won't be alerted and they'll probably never know). OR just stop being so overt, and for goodness sake, don't make all those new group memberships and OpenLink badge icons visible on your profile.
IMPLICATION FOR BOSSES: Get over it. Even in an era of networking in an industry that's thirsty for talent, most people won't find their new jobs online.
-- Cara@NewCoordinates.com
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
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Good post, Cara.
ReplyDeleteThis may be obvious, but everyone should have a strategy as to whom they do/don't link to. I'd recommend avoiding "open linkers" like the plague. These are people who will connect to everyone they can, regardless of whether they know you. In addition to the obvious question of why you'd allow them into your network, the problem is that when you're actually looking for real links to people you want to reach (recruit, biz dev, etc), these open linkers keep showing up. But they can't really connect you to those people as they don't know them either. I won't add someone as a LinkedIn connection if I wouldn't feel comfortable calling them to ask for a referral or offering to make an introduction to someone in my network.