How to make Veterans more accessible to recruiters on LinkedIn?
I’ll start this post with a confession — I’m kind of addicted to LinkedIn and spend more time here than anywhere else. I love how LinkedIn has been successfully able to connect 400 million+ members connect with each other, sharing job postings and work anecdotes and helping each other.
I’ve always wondered how to make this service better but had no idea how to go about it. Then I enrolled in a Product Management boot-camp — Product School and that’s where I’m learning how to think like a Product Manager and bring ideas to life.
Every member profile in LinkedIn is unique and people use their profiles to showcase their skills and achievements. And that certainly does help them — but there’s a significant section of society which might not be able to make the best use of this amazing platform as it is.
Think about it? Which crucial section of the society is using LinkedIn — but perhaps not able to highlight their single-most important affiliation — it’s the VETERANS!
Armed Forces Veterans make up close to 3 million members on LinkedIn and most of them have great profiles — undoubtedly, they have skills every employer wants — loyalty, leadership ability, integrity, reliability, and most importantly — working as a team.
250,000 men and women transition out of their military service every year, this is a rich source of talent any employer would be looking to tap into.
And corporate America sure does need talent — here are some info-graphics from the 10th Annual Talent Shortage Survey by ManpowerGroup:
And the picture is not any different globally:
And the top reason why employers are finding it difficult to fill jobs:
For more info-graphics and details, the link to Manpower Talent Shortage Survey is given at the end.
So, like a scientific method, we have established the problem (talent shortage) and also identified a solution (transitioning veterans with valuable skills) — but from here, the situation moves from the realm of science to Hollywood romance (I’m thinking about the movie Serendipity) where our romantic leads keep missing each other by a whisker.
Think about, it — how does a recruiter today search for Veterans on LinkedIn? If I was a recruiter, this is something that I would’ve done:
This is a highly inefficient key-word search and leaves out room for error — especially if the those keywords are not used in the LinkedIn profile.
And I have a better solution — a moonshot (Ok, not a moonshot — there’s a surprisingly simple solution to this issue). Imagine an elegant way to make two tasks simpler at one go:
- As a Military Veteran, I want to make my profile uniquely noticeable
- As a Recruiter, I want to make my search efficient while searching for candidates
This will be beneficial to all the parties involved — Veterans get to highlight their profile, Recruiters get to contact the right candidates faster and for LinkedIn — increase in the number of subscribers, and intangible goodwill created in the social media.
And now comes the shameless click-bait: I have the solution ready, and I’d love to show it to folks at LinkedIn. Can you help me connect with the right folks?
Link to ManpowerGroup Annual Talent Shortage Survey 2015: http://www.manpowergroup.us/campaigns/talent-shortage-2015/index.html
Originally published on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-make-veterans-more-accessible-recruiters-linkedin-choudhury?trk=prof-post
