The Future of Work-The professional networking conversation

It’s that time of the year again when our inboxes are filled with trends to watch out for this year in HR. Expect the usual HR culprits like diversity & inclusion, new emerging technologies like AI, and remote work. Sadly, though in all my (few) years in HR, I’ve never come across a report that touched on professional networking as a changing dynamic in the new world of work. This is even from the largest professional networking platform in the world, LinkedIn, which produces many annual reports.

But with millennials being the largest group in the workplace already and Gen Z already preparing to come in, I believe this is a much-needed discussion on the future of professional networking for today's workers with the growing social technology landscape. For us to get a clearer picture of the future of work in Africa, we need to understand the demographics first.

By 2055, the continent’s youth population (aged 15–24), is expected to be more than double the 2015 total of 226 million.

And here they are in the workplace;

Photo by Kon Karampelas on Unsplash

The 2017 IMF Report on millennials and the future of work put it perfectly.

This issue of F&D examines the economic opportunities and challenges of millennials, who will try to earn a living in a work world decidedly different from the one their parents inhabited. Millennials are entering the workforce at a time of technological change and economic disruption. These forces are shaping the choices they make and the experiences they seek — even as this generation in turn shapes the global economy. Born between 1980 and 2000, millennials are the largest generation in the modern era. While their elders — the baby boomers and the Gen Xers — are digital immigrants, millennials are true digital natives, with an instinctual feel for the latest technology.

The largest generation in the modern workplace who will take up over 75% of the jobs by 2020 is rapidly changing how society views the terms ‘work’ and ‘workplace’ in the digital era. New technologies are creating the path for things like remote work (An estimated 1B workers will be remote by 2035) and conversations around automation, AI & by extension robots, and the future of work. So how is the oldest professional networking platform in the world taking up these changes and adapting to meet the new generation of professionals? Here’s our take on why millennials are switching to new platforms to meet their digital work needs.

But first, why should you care? What’s the place of networking platforms in the world of work & talent acquisition?

As a recruiter, networking sites could provide you with better insights into what the community is talking about, i.e. what matters to your candidates, how do they communicate, who influences them, when do they communicate, with whom, and on which platforms. This will guide your employer's branding efforts. As the numbers above indicate, we will be expecting the new-gen to connect & share more about their interests, desires, and even employment experiences. We’ve seen this so far this year in Kenya with the trending hashtags #Toxicworkplaces and #payinterns that drove these conversations onto mainstream media as well. Facebook last week, for instance, held a live session on careers with WhatsApp's top engineers where participants could get a peek into life at WhatsApp and ask questions from all over the world.

By following conversations online, a recruiter can also generate a talent pipeline of passive candidates who are usually the largest group of candidates(75%). It’s also much easier to reach out to candidates where they already are, i.e online, in an environment they are comfortable in. Social sites also allow us to get far more information on candidates or companies that help with hiring decision-making. You also stand a better chance of generating awareness of your jobs because of impressions and shares. This is why referrals are the number 1 most effective source of hire for long-term employees. As Boryana Dineva, HR alumni at Wikipedia and Tesla put it, “The wider and stronger your network, the quicker you can get work done.”

CareerBuilder survey, 70 percent of employers use social networking sites to research job candidates

As a professional, networking sites keep you updated on current trends & conversations in your field and beyond. They can help you get access to connections you would not necessarily have gotten offline. They can provide an outlet away from the workplace to interact with the outside community and gain diverse perspectives on issues. A lot of young people have also gotten jobs online on platforms like Instagram and Twitter.

The new candidate needs

LinkedIn came into existence in 2002. A typical millennial was around 12 years old at the time, meaning the platform was created with our parents in mind. 17 years later, the platform has little to show for its agility. While preparing for this post, I asked my millennial friend why he doesn’t use LinkedIn any more. And this was his response.

It's too official. The content doesn’t speak to me in an authentic way and is usually borrowed. The connections you meet are ‘fictional’ and too ‘corporate’. For instance, I follow Elon Musk the CEO of Tesla. If you compare his Linkedin profile(Elon did delete it) and Twitter, the possibility of actually getting a response from this top leader on Linkedin is meagre compared to Twitter where he’s more human and interacts more.

So let’s look at LinkedIn’s key value propositions and see how new tools are separately serving these needs, which will ultimately make LinkedIn less competitive in this space;

• Online professional profiles — A portfolio of your work. At the Women in Talent event last week, the session kicked off with a discussion on the Cv and its outdatedness since it was created in the 90s for hard skills. A lot of things have changed since then. Recruiters are putting more focus on soft skills and the lack of reliability of CV information and interviews is calling for new ways to hire, as predicted by 2018 reports. The need also fueled this by recruiters to get a better picture of the candidates and form a better assessment of them. So in this sense, Linkedin doesn’t make sense as a profile for the future since it is almost an online copy of the Cv in content & format. Secondly, the CV format has not worked for professionals in different industries who express their work differently, for instance, designers, architects, writers, trainers, etc. Linkedin tried to capture this need by allowing users to add photos and links to their work description but it wasn’t too natural for old users so many haven’t taken it up. We find platforms like Twitter where one can find highly engaged professionals through the content they share regarding their professions or highly targeted sites like Behance for graphic designers and GitHub for Developers. Thirdly, millennials are highly multi-skilled because of access to lots of information and the need to secure employment chances in the highly competitive market. Most millennials thus don't wish to be described by just one term, e.g. Accounting Professional. Young people want a more inclusive space that understands work as a part of a bigger space that they wish to share with their co-workers. So there’s little demarcation between work & ‘non-work’ life. Therefore, people share jokes in WhatsApp groups and mention each other on Twitter posts. Enter sites like Bumble Bizz which lets users upload up to 6 photos that describe their work. In my case, for instance, I could use this to showcase not just my HR competencies but other skills as well as coding, running events, blogging, community engagement, design & sketching, etc.

• Professional networking-Connecting with people we know and don’t know for the sake of professional engagements. Older professionals are sticking to Linkedin because they argue other sites are not professional. What we refer to is the signal vs noise ratio in networking sites. The question here is what do millennials consider noise? Twitter’s biggest defense here is that it allows you to access info posted by anyone in any part of the world. Their biggest gold is they remove the friction between you and your next connect or content. Without any barrier, info flows faster and more freely on Twitter than on any other site. I still have Linkedin connection requests I sent over 1 year ago, still waiting for people’s responses. On Twitter, any CEO is just a follow or tweet away. After you follow the people you prefer, Twitter then tries to personalize your feed towards the conversations that would matter to you. Twitter just this week also introduced a notification for posts recommended to you based on your history. Because of this, I’ve been able to follow very good HR conversations with people from different places. Secondly, the conversations on Twitter are up-to-date, and the platform's main advantage is its ability to keep users informed about current world events. Just this January on Kenyan Twitter, 3 stories related to the workplace caused a stir online. One of the biggest stories of 2019 so far was of a fraudster who had been packaging themselves online as a brand strategist and has posted severally on Linkedin about big brands he’s helped build, like Usain Bolt. He even went as far as holding LinkedIn Kenya meetups and quoting himself as the LinkedIn East Africa Ambassador. For years, this went by until one of the personalities mentioned tweeted that he was not affiliated with him and it was fake branding. From there, there was no turning back on the conversation that trended for 3 days straight. The second story was a lady who asked people to share their stories on #toxicworkplaces and within hours, millennials took to Twitter to share horror stories about their current & former workplaces. Third was a lady who took upon Twitter to share her feedback about her interviewing process at a large NGO. We’ve talked about this trend before in various articles about millennials opting for social proof when choosing to apply for a job, hence the growth of Glassdoor. The story was quickly shared on various platforms including WhatsApp groups with one where I’m a member attaching it as a reply to an earlier post of a data science job post by the same company proving the trait by Millennials to willingly share negative & positive reviews about companies or products and trying to ‘warn’ others about it too. Which brings us to this point here.
• Sharing- The principle of content sharing and creation builds all networking platforms. While LinkedIn in Kenya has 2 million registered users, the engagement levels are way below those of other sites. (See numbers below)

Social Media Stats Kenya June 2019

Most users on LinkedIn don’t know how to use the platform because of the continued preaching that ‘this is strictly a professional platform’, leaving you with thousands of spam connection requests and ‘Hi” inbox messages, then silence. The technology itself works against itself by providing friction between content and contacts, which is unnatural. Unlike Facebook, for instance, which hugely invests in its technology, specifically Artificial Intelligence, LinkedIn’s technology is nothing to boast about. AI is what enables FB to give you personalized recommendations on events, pages, connections, and content. LinkedIn, on the other hand, started using hashtags last year to try to bring people together through similar topics, but the idea isn’t picking up as fast as hashtags on Twitter.

It’s also much harder to share a post from LinkedIn to other platforms like WhatsApp. This is a crucial factor to consider e.g. when thinking of sourcing in the social media age because you have to consider the accessibility of the platform, the number of views & reach & how easy is it for others to share this job ad or post. The post shared will also not include a snippet of the content which is what millennials like to see. Because of the huge amounts of content shared per second, users just have seconds to see your content & choose to engage with it. My Linkedin Lite mobile app, for instance, doesn’t allow me to share pictures as a reply to a post or even edit a post I’ve shared.

This also goes to talk about the type of content being shared most. The future of social is video, as Mark Zuckerberg stated last year. Most sites are optimizing for this, including Twitter, Google apps, and Facebook. From video calling & conferencing to live streaming events, video is increasingly becoming a big part of our social apps. We’ll go deeper into the future of social in another post.

Let’s look at some engagement statistics from Facebook that will make this comparison clearer.

1. 52 billion people on average, log onto Facebook daily and are considered daily active users (Facebook DAU) for December 2018. This represents a 9 percent increase year over year (Source: Facebook as 1/30/19). By DAU FB means the average user spends at least 20mins daily on the site. How often do you log into LinkedIn and ACTIVELY engage with it? And No. Liking random posts and sending connection requests to HRPs doesn’t count.
2. On average, the Like and Share Buttons are viewed across almost 10 million websites daily. (Source: Facebook as of 10/2/2014) Making it the most reasonable choice for someone who wishes to have more referral traffic to their site, ad or content.
3. 4.75 billion pieces of content were shared daily as of May 2013 which is a 94 percent increase from August 2012. (Source: Facebook)

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

FB users themselves generate most of this content online. In Linkedin, however, your organic post is squeezed between Shell US talking about their oil numbers and a random connection sharing a motivational quote. Facebook and Twitter have found ways to make sure in the age of too much content, they show only the most relevant content. Despite these numbers, nearly 2 in 3 say their employer does not (or knows how to) use social media to promote job openings. (Glassdoor survey, March 2013)

So, if LinkedIn was designed for professional engagement, why have other sites simplified the process of connecting with like-minded professionals? Also, when was the last time a friend sent you a post on your area of interest and it was a LinkedIn post or link?

• Access to new jobs- One of Linkedin’s key value propositions was access to millions of jobs worldwide. While this may be true, because of it’s high costs for the Recruiter Lite & Premium tools for companies, in Kenya most companies opted to just use normal job boards and other less expensive options. This left Linkedin with little traffic to their job page and they chose to scrape jobs from jobwebkenya, a local job board, which posts hundreds of jobs daily and had more traffic. Again, any recruiter will have to consider reaching for their jobs when evaluating options. If the numbers are anything to go by, Linkedin wouldn’t be option 1, especially for entry-level jobs. Some companies are even taking to Twitter, Slack, Whatsapp, podcasts, and Medium to share job opportunities. For instance, it would be more effective to share a Project Manager post in a PM Whatsapp or Slack group instead of another platform.*Facebook has also introduced a jobs feature in their app allowing users to post jobs.
• Learning- Even with SlideShare, did LinkedIn take too long to offer this very important tool? By the time LinkedIn Learning was made open on the platform, other entrepreneurs had seized the opportunity by providing affordable & even free learning platforms. Such include Youtube where you can find content on almost any topic to more learning platforms like Khan Academy, Udemy, Udacity, and Coursera. Teachable for instance in Africa has been a hit because of how easy it is to create courses & earn while at it. This is very critical since millennials want to share and create their content. Most social networks are built on user-generated content (UGC) nonetheless. With live streaming possible for tools like Twitter, Facebook & Youtube now, professionals can get access to real-time training & discussions on their mobile phones opening up the term social learning. Most are for FREE.
• Groups- LinkedIn groups have been replaced by WhatsApp & Telegram groups and Facebook pages, which again have little friction for new users and have more functionality for page admins & users. On Facebook, for instance, you can create an event within a page or group, have a live event, post announcements, jobs, and files, and even get reviews from users.
• Employer Branding-Employer branding is the top of recruiters' minds because of Millennials. Like with the Facebook example given above, combine other digital tools that LinkedIn doesn’t have to get ahead with Gen Z &Y, such as live streaming. Setting up alerts can also enable you to stay on top of mentions on social media good or bad. You have to spread & monitor your online presence across all online platforms. The divide between work & play is slowly being erased, meaning you can’t afford to just leave your EB on your LinkedIn company page. If TikTok is a hit because of short funny videos, how can you use this format to share about life at ABC? How can you use photos & short videos to share the same on Instagram? Same goes for job seekers. How can these platforms show your best to potential recruiters or colleagues? *Tiktok is now testing video resumes in US. *
• Engagement- Gone are the days when HR would hide behind company pages and the desk. You have to be part of the conversation where & when it’s happening to appeal to young workers. Consider the following and the first numbers we posted above;

69% are likely to apply to a job if the employer actively manages its employer brand (e.g., responds to reviews, updates their profile, shares updates on the culture and work environment). (Glassdoor U.S. Site Survey, January 2016; However nearly 3 in 4 say their employer does not (or know how to) promote their employment brand on social media. (Glassdoor survey, March 2013).

Around 70% of Millennials say they hear about companies through friends and job boards. (Collegefeed, March 2014)

68% of consumers trust reviews more when they see both good and bad reviews. (Revoo Insight research, 2013)

78% of job seekers say that ratings and reviews from those on the inside are influential when deciding where to work. (Glassdoor survey, September 2014)

Glassdoor and other social sites like Twitter(as the example we described above) are now coming in to provide authentic content from current & future employees about aspects of employment that matter to them. Most company pages on LinkedIn are hardly updated or just contain business updates instead of culture and opportunities, with almost zero engagement with potential candidates. Candidates, especially passive ones, want to know more about your company from its mission to what it’s like working there. For these, some other types of platforms may be best. Our follow-up article on emotional branding also dives deeper into this.

FOMO(fear of missing out) often described as ‘ a desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing’ by Wikipedia is also a huge brick for any social site that Linkedin has failed miserably at with young workers. There’s almost worldwide anxiety when WhatsApp or Instagram breaks down for an hour. Would you feel the same if Linkedin shut down for even a day or a week?

In conclusion, the professional world has changed and will continue to change, driven by demographic & technology changes. As a candidate, you’re not just limited to one platform/avenue of getting a job or connecting with your profession. The same goes for recruiters who are finding it hard to hire millennials and attract passive talent. And for HR tech entrepreneurs, the options are limitless as to what opportunities this market can unfold in the future.

A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is. It is what consumers tell each other it is. — Scott Cook

All the best. And try to keep up.

If you want more tips on how to utilize LinkedIn for professional growth, check out our follow up article.