Early in LinkedIn’s life, it was one of the coolest places to be in Silicon Valley: a network on LinkedIn showed your influence, your connections, and your status as a professional. It’s been a long time since those early days, and many of our readers will likely roll their eyes at our suggestion that LinkedIn was once ‘cool.’
LinkedIn has grown a lot, and is now the de facto standard for professional networking. Here at Shortlist, we still believe LinkedIn is destination zero for job seekers and recruiters alike, and that having a great profile is an asset.
But a great network is only as good as its members, and here at Shortlist we crunched the numbers for a space we know well: asset management. We found that industry leaders simply aren’t on LinkedIn. So while they have hundreds of millions of people on the network, the most influential and Connected folks don’t spend time there - suggesting that what industry leaders want in a professional platform can’t be found on LinkedIn.
Senior Asset Management Leaders, by the numbers
As usual, we’ve analyzed the problem with data, using the public management and executive committees, as well as boards of 20 of the largest asset managers (public and private) to see who maintains a LinkedIn profile. This includes firms like PIMCO, Goldman Sachs, but also alternative managers like Bridgewater Associates. All in all, we investigated 300 people who are among the most senior individuals at the world’s largest and best asset managers.
The results are surprising only for the scale: 60% of firm leaders don’t even have a LinkedIn profile.
This percentage is even higher when you consider that most people who do have a profile don’t fill it out or have only a handful of connections.
Limited Engagement
Of the minority of asset management leaders that even have LinkedIn profiles, half of them had very little to no detail, which suggests that they spend little time there indeed. In all, only 20% of the folks we looked had a profile with the amount of detail you’d want and expect when looking on LinkedIn. And their low number of connections suggests a correspondingly low level of engagement with the platform.
A network where you can only find one in five of the people you’re seeking for isn’t a particularly useful network. And even these folks don’t appear to be using the platform in a way that goes beyond marketing their personal or corporate brand.
What brings the 20%?
The summer I worked at LinkedIn, I knew one guy whose job it was to work with the EA’s and Chiefs of Staff of every senior Fortune 500 CEO. I envied the access he had to these senior leaders, until I realized what his job actually was: to work with them to create LinkedIn profiles. You see, when LinkedIn started its influencer program, many of the senior folks who they wanted writing didn’t have profiles. LinkedIn brought these leaders onto the platform by promising an audience.
From that story, you can imagine that many of the senior individuals engaged on the platform are on the INfluencer program. The folks who have built out profiles are, most of the time, people with INfluencer status.
In asset management, titans like Larry Fink at Blackrock and Roger Ferguson at TIAA CREF have used the platform to share over a dozen pieces. But those voices are the exception rather than the rule and our sense is that often their INfluencer page is simply an extension of their corporate branding.
So what do senior leaders want?
In reality, once you’ve reached a certain level of seniority, you’re almost certain to receive hundreds or thousands of more requests than you can fulfill —for “connections”, sales pitches, favors, etc.
Network dynamics only work if you reciprocity can play a part, and at the senior level, most of the folks asking can’t reciprocate. As a result, they don’t participate actively on LinkedIn.
What’s needed? A new model
Closed, curated networks like Shortlist makes sure everyone on the network can give as well as take. It ensures the information shown to the leaders is relevant to their level of experience and to their authority.
Because ultimately people want to feel like they belong to a network that is friendly and valuable to them, where they sit amongst peers.
Unfortunately for senior asset managers (and leaders across industries), that network is not LinkedIn.
