How to make LinkedIn useful & truthful
LinkedIn has lots of uses. Networking, business development, sharing items of interest, and keeping in touch with former colleagues are just a few examples. There are, as of February 2016, 414 million people using LinkedIn. And many of those people use it for job searching — their next role. Recruiters use it too, to find candidates.
In 2015 in the UK 1.2 million employees changed jobs, and LinkedIn played a fair sized role in that. 60% of LinkedIn’s Q1 2015 revenue came from job listings (the most recent data available). In February 2016 there were over 3 million active job listings on the site. 40% of LinkedIn users use the mobile app to apply for roles. So clearly LinkedIn is a key ‘go-to’ for people when looking for new roles.
They even have tools aimed at this market — Talent Solutions for recruiters, and Job Seeker for, well, Job Seekers. Yet the Job Seeker element gets a ‘fail’ from me. Why? It isn’t useful, it is a bit half-baked. I’ve applied for roles using it, and the issue is that any role can be posted, and the role sounds like it is a match with your experience and skills, so you apply. At that point, if you are lucky enough to get a response, you tend to discover, as I have more times than I really would think is acceptable, that a VP role is only going to pay £80,000 for a role with one of the world’s largest companies, or a role that reports into the CEO that is for a digital director and is a board level role only wants to pay £120,000.
And this is where LinkedIn does a disservice, to itself, and to Job Seekers. It takes time to go through roles that — even when you fill in filters, and define your desired role as much as possible, to find LinkedIn is alerting you to roles that pay £25,000 a year, making you wonder what is going on with the algorithm. It takes time to rework a CV for a specific role, and write a stand out covering letter. It lets job seekers down by not requiring a specific salary band as part of the job posting — give or take £20,000 — to be listed with the role. Otherwise, you get called immediately when someone gets your CV, because they can’t believe their luck, and you have to explain to them that based on how the role spec was written, you thought you were applying for a very different role, so the conversation halts quickly, and it is a waste of time for the recruiter, and the candidate.
So LinkedIn, please make this useful again. It is a key part of your offering, your revenue stream, and people want to use it. Yet the frustration is growing with applicants. You wouldn’t allow articles to be published that are half-done, or not full of the facts, so why not require the same of job postings?
You are a trusted brand — so show that same trust and respect to your users. My guess? Your revenues will go up even more, because you will become more relevant, and useful.
Kristine is an Anglo-American, Brooklynite by birth, British citizen by choice. She is really quite simple. Wants: wine, whisky, 30 hour day, lots of sleep. Ecomm/digital geek. Sports mad. Wants to be in Cornwall, and in her next career, an F1 driver (or will happily retrain to be a F1 driver) or Serena Williams. Hates bad algorithims.
This article was orginally published on LinkedIn on 8 /2 /16
