How good is your LinkedIn Profile???!!!
How good is your LinkedIn Profile???!!!
Category: LinkedIN
How good is your LinkedIn Profile???!!!
Well LinkedIn have decided that the Recruitment Agency market is to big not to service it. The new product called LinkedIn Recruiter is launched that enables Recruitment Agencies to harvest the full power of the LinkedIn Social Network.
Is LinkedIN Recruiter a good or a bad thing for you?
Well, depends from your standpoint. LinkedIn as any other social network is finding hard to monetise it’s service. The subscriptions to Employers aren’t making the desired revenue levels. Advertising Jobs didn’t take up in most of markets. In Ireland for example, there is about 30ish jobs advertised in LinkedIn at one time for the last two years (January 2009: 17 jobs in Ireland advertised in LinkedIN). Obviously not a sustainable business model. Considering and national job board even in the recession times has thousands of jobs advertised.
Therefore from a LinkedIn’s perspective, this is clearly a new revenue stream.
From the Recruitment Agency perspective, this lets them in LinkedIn on a completely different level than before. Built in protection when the staff leaves and being able to share the contacts and the communication is what was always missing element for the recruitment agencies. LinkedIn Recruiter is here to offer all what a recruitment agencies need to use LinkedIn on a larger scale than before.
And then there is a job hunter, the passive job hunter, the ordinary LinkedIn user. How will LinkedIn Recruiter affect him/her?
One thing is for sure – the amount of the job offers sent via LinkedIn InMail is going to increase. In markets where the LinkedIn Recruiter is going to be large, and there is a shortage of certain skills in the workforce, some LinkedIn users will find themselves as a target to job offers. So far it was great – since they wanted Employers to find them when they have a job for them. What happens when the Recruitment Agencies have a capacity to get to them easily is that a great ‘candidate’ will be contacted by every recruitment agency trying to fill the same position. So you might get 5, 10, 20,… InMails from all different Recruitment Agencies who are interested to head hunt you for the same role. If you not like the role – will you respond to all of them saying: ‘No Thanks.’? And when that happens next week when another company has a similar role, and you get XX InMails about it again?
So the success of sales of LinkedIn Recruiter will decrease the quality of the LinkedIn service for the job hunters that have skills that are in demand in their markets.
The trade off that LinkedIn is making with introducing LinkedIn Recruiter is that to increase their profits, they decided that it’s OK to decrease the quality of the service they are providing to their most sought users. The longer term problem for LinkedIn is what if those best users leave, finding they get too much SPAM? And with that crème candidates cut off, LinkedIn all of a sudden becomes not a source of Good passive Candidates, but of just … Passive Candidates? And even those slightly fed up by being hassled by many recruiters for the same job they don’t want in the first place?
Then again, LinkedIn limits the number of InMails that a recruiters can send a month. It is 50 a month (to multiple recipients each). So to reach more candidates and send more InMails a recruitment agency will just by more licenses. That creates more revenue for LinkedIn, so they will turn a blind eye that the top candidates gets bombarded with job offers.
Ireland might be a bit specific in that regard. Ireland is a small country where everyone knows everyone. (Almost) Literally! Online Social Networking take up in Ireland is far lower than in the US (where LinkedIn is from). Ireland is still the country where more people get a job via the traditional Job Boards than via the Social Networks. The ratio is changing, but we are far from the situation currently in US or Far East.
Who will be the first Irish recruitment agency in Ireland to take up the LinkedIn Recruiter offer?
Creating your personal and or company brand is a delicate act on the social networking sites. You really need to be genuine, positive, honest, and stand behind anything you say. And that is something in the contradiction with the main task – being Active. What do you say on a web 2.0 sites – if you have nothing to say that day? You know you need to be active and communicate with others. The long term success of that contribution you make to the social networking – depends on the Quality of your contribution. If you have nothing to say – say nothing.
Quality of your online content
It took me a lot of time to learn that. After some time (and numerous mistakes!) I have realised that it is sometimes worth far more to post once a week on a blog than once a day! The quality of the content is actually far more worth than the quantity. If it takes a week to write a good article, do not rush it. Do not force yourself to publish when you do not have something of a value for your audience.
Digital Footprint
All you say (write) on the Web 2.0 sites will stay there, and will work for or against you in the future. It will always be easy to put your name or your company name in Google and check what you are all about. Your name associated with something you are not proud while publishing it – will most likely hurt you at some stage in the future. Carefully choose what photos you publish, and how you represent yourself on the web. Your digital footprint is there to stay!
Release your Marketing Message
The social networking sites like LinkedIN, Twitter and Facebook and blogs let you publish your ideas, thoughts and opinions. Define who you are and what you are. Then define who your target market and the audience are. List the topics you know about and they want to hear about. Bring your original marketing message in the mix. Do not push it on your audience. Leave it there for them to take it.
Let Go of your Marketing Message
This is what worries most of us. Corporations are shivering with just the idea of it! What do you mean by letting go of our (so far always tightly controlled) marketing message?
In the Social Web, the users will take your messages and give their spin on it. Here you are getting crowd generated picture of your brand. Your only made the initial input and slightly steering and maintaining it later on. Your audience – the crowd will decide if they like your message, and will contribute to it.
Candidate Digital Personal Branding
Your CV is great tool to open the doors. But it gives you what you want to say about yourself. This is why recruiters ask for references. To check up and make sure all you wrote is true, and that there isn’t something important missing.
In the Digital world of the Blogs and Social Networks – it is all about the public opinions being formed around yourself. It is about the number of people you are connected, about the ‘qualities’ of this connections. It is about the quality of your contribution to the public communication. It is about the response from the crowd on your social communication contribution. Does the crowd like you? Do they value your professional opinions?
How do you measure your Digital Branding success?
When the people you do not know, not your co workers, not friends or family, simple people who find you online – publicly show respect to your work and you – you must be doing a lot of good! It doesn’t happen overnight! You will need to invest a lot in creating a digital brand. Regardless if that is yourself or your company brand. It takes time.
The Social Web is changing. Remember MySpace? Remember Bebo? Both are gone. Have you started with Google Wave, or did you decided that you will be left behind? Social media tools are changing. You need to change your skills to be able to follow the change. Your message although always the same in its essence will have to be adapted for every new web publishing and collaboration tool that comes around.
Conclusion and a Real Life Personal Branding Example
Related to the recent article about the Internet traffic on Job Sites, I asked the LinkedIN Users for their input via the LinkedIN discussion: Irish jobs sites traffic comparison chart. Here is just a short few sentences I got as a reply:
Thanks Ivan and admire your humble approach. I suspect this combined with your vast knowledge and being a genuine nice person is how you have gained my respect and trust of so many others also. You have not become one of the market leaders for no reason…
…Hope to catch up with you again at the Christmas drinks.
Would like to hear how other niche and generalist job boards are doing, if you’d like to share….
MD of one of the Irish Jobs Site
When you start getting positive comments like this from the ‘crowd’ – people you are not associated to in any way, they start forming a Digital Image of your brand. Competitors recognition as in this case is of the utmost importance – that was the reason I have chosen this comment in front of all the others. It is a bit like the eBay and the recommendations it introduced smartly in ecommerce. People trust brands that are positively spoken about online.
What will you do today to create a Digital Image of yourself that you desire?
Jobs.ie and EmployIreland.com are the only two web sites that recorded a growth of the unique visitors numbers during September this year. According to Complete who collects the public data, as opposed to the marketing messages from the job boards, Irish Jobs, RecruitIreland and Monster both recorded a significant drop of traffic during September 2009.
September is the very important month in the online recruitment industry. In the previous ten years, almost all leading job boards would have a record numbers of visitors in September. The current recession is obviously affecting the online recruitment industry.
Are the social recruitment sites like LinkedIN and even twitter, or Irish start-ups like Jobs Market stealing the traffic from the job boards? It certainly seems the case, since the traditional job boards are obviously getting less traffic.
So what have Jobs.ie and EmplyIreland.com done to keep the traffic rising during September? A bit of SEO perhaps? What do you think?
Me in the press again. This time in the InBusiness magazine by Chambers Ireland. Here are a few snippets:
“PEOPLE WILL BE COMFORTABLE BUYING FROM A COMPANY THAT HAS THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE RECOMMENDING THEM.” – Ivan Stojanovic
Conventional advertising and marketing strategies are typically one-way communications with the product or service provider addressing customers. However, social media and social networking sites offer businesses the opportunity to engage with their customers or clients. Blogs, forums and profile pages can reach a large potential market, are free, and will allow a company to conduct market research and respond to the needs of their customers. It’s important to remember that your aim is to encourage customers to visit your website where they can get more information andenquire about making a purchase. “Facebook itself will not sell your products or services directly,” says Ivan Stojanovic. “However, if used correctly, it will bring visitors who should then be encouraged to leave comments about your offering. Your company blog will also drive relevant interested visitors to your company page where they can purchase your products or services.”
Building visibility and brand awareness on social networking sites is relatively easy. Building credibility, on the other hand, takes time and effort. However, once that is achieved, third-party recommendations can be a major boost for your business. Stojanovic agrees: “People will be comfortable buying from a company that has thousands of people recommending them, and not a single unhappy customer. eBay pioneered the introduction of social media on their existing merchant site. When you buy something, you can rate a supplier. This brought trust into online shopping and made eBay the largest online shopping site.”
Marketing to the masses InBusiness Autumn 09 2009 / 31
Social Networks are here! Recruitment and sourcing in particular is changing. Job Boards that the recruitment agencies have been relying for as their main source of candidates are getting smaller role to play today. The future for the job boards is not extremely bright either. Their dominance is being replaced by the social networks. There are more and better candidates using social networks than job boards. Recruiters had to follow the trend – moving their business of the job boards – to the social networks.
Job boards will not really die tomorrow. Job boards will still have their place in the online recruitment world. Most of them in a bit different shape or form. They will serve as repository for active jobs, and feed their data to the web sites with the high ant targeted traffic (do you recognise the description of a social network here?).
A lot of the recruiters are not extremely happy with the way that social networking sites are changing the recruitment. They feel the threatened. Why? They feel that they will be bypassed since employers will be able to source and recruit directly on the social networking web sites. Those recruiters go that far that they themselves do not use the social networks, trying to stop the wheel of change.
The change is here. And more of it is coming. Embrace it. Don’t fight it. Resistance is futile.
Online recruitment as well as any online business are changing. Changing constantly and rapidly (Microsoft: At the Speed of Light). Adoption spread and growth of the Internet fuel the acceleration of the change of Internet itself. Market penetration phase is shortening, and the market reach is growing.
Social networks are NOT the end of the recruitment agencies.
Internet brought the quick and cheap advertising to the recruiters 15 years ago in a form of job boards. Employers used them as well as recruitment agents. Both successfully. Both competed for the same candidate. Social networks are no different. Both direct employers and recruitment consultants will use them. If used right, social networks will be (are today!) extremely beneficial in the recruitment process. Does this mean the end of the tunnel for the recruitment agencies? Absolutely not! Recruitment agents have their place in the recruitment process, and will always have it as long as they add value. The tools they use will always the be the tools that are on the disposal of the employers as well. Social networks today, and whatever comes along tomorrow.
… when all the personal branding channels are combined.
In no particular order:
1. Social networks presence – descriptive public profile combined with the active participation in discussions.
2. Personal Blog
3. Presence on the Corporate Blog
4. Any online publication (indexed by Google)
The real power of all your online presence is in the ability to connect all those channels together. Ad your friends and co workers in social networks, drive them to your blog for more status updates, get them subscribed to your RSS feeds and twitter. From your RSS and tweets send them back to your questions and discussion on your blog and social networks, and increase the readership in every jump from one media to another.
Personal branding practice as above replaces the necessity to look for a job on jobs sites. The recruiters will ‘know about you’ already anyway. Just blog daily, and publish one article or a question in the social network of your choice (relevance to your target industry).
Photos from:
Clarion Hotel Dublin: Social Media Networking Event
Find a Worker is a jobs site and a business directory with a little bit of the social networking as well.
Find a worker is a job site. You can post a job for free.
Find a Worker is a business directory web site. You can promote your business here. Like the Golden Pages.
Find a worker is a personal branding site. You can advertise your own skills for free. Like LinkedIN.
What is missing on Find a Worker? Of course, and iPhone application to grasp all that data.
As a side offer, you can also purchase web sites on Find a Worker. They will also make sure that: “… your site is added to google with the appropriate keywords and meta tags…”.
Irish online recruitment scene is changing. There is more and more sites with innovative ideas like Find a Worker. Hundreds if not thousands will finish where they started, but one day one new idea and a site like this will change the way we do recruitment completely. It is the right time for the change!
Your LinkedIN Profile is most likely a copy of your CV. If a recruiter does a ‘Background Check’ to verify your CV the same data will be on your LinkedIN ‘Published’ online Profile, and that is great. Your CV is all true. The issue with the CV and the LinkedIN Profile being the same is a missed opportunity for a job seeker.
Your LinkedIN Profile should tell far more than your CV does to a recruiter.
What to include in your LinkedIN Profile?
Link to your Blog. On your blog you can show all different qualities a recruiter is searching for:
Expertise in a subject
Communication skills
Writing skills
Presentation skills
Team Building skills
And much more!
Links to your Twitter account where your conversations with the other influencers in the market and subject matter expert are published and visible are the next essential part of your LinkedIN Profile. Your network of known people and especially their recommendations are what sets you apart from the thousands of other applicants for the same job.
The CV opens the door. It invites the recruiter to start the research about you. Make sure your social media and social networking presence is the extension of your CV. If your LinkedIN Profile is a copy of your CV, it doesn’t really have a great value. It is also an opportunity missed.
Here are just two facts first:
1. Revenues of online job boards are falling
2. Social networks are (still!) gaining popularity
Why are job boards in trouble all of the sudden after being profitable for more than 10 years?
The troubled world economy that hit the recession in the second half of the 2008 and continued well into most of the 2009 (is it over yet???!!!) resulted in the first dip of the volume of the internet traffic. First ever actually. It is the first time since the Internet exists that the volume of the activity on the internet was smaller compared with the same month a year ago. All the iPhones and all kind of internet enabled devices did not help here. There have been far less people working (and surfing in their breaks), and far less people had time to surf during their work.
The combination of the large reduction of the job advertisements (that generate the revenue for the job boards, and also the drop in web site traffic in general – the figures of a job boards in 2009 do not look so rosy!
Social networks are a long term threat to the job boards.
The number of people spending time, and the sheer amount of time people spend on the social networking sites does not really leave much time to search the job boards. Compared to the job boards, the social networking sites are actually extremely boring. There is 0 interaction on the site really. As a job hunter you apply for a job or jobs you like, and what you get back in 99% of the cases is an automated response in the email. The confirmation of the job application. Impersonal and sterile. The social networks on the other side let you publish the content for other users (or anyone on internet) to read and see. Social networks let you say what you think (that your spouse doesn’t!). Social networks encourage you to comment pretty much anything!
You can meet new people. You can catch up with old school mates. You can check the last summer holiday photos of your cousins. You can upload your fancy wedding photos, with all the family in strange dresses in the background! You can grade photos and comment them. You can upload video from your car racing weekend. Your greatest fishing catch.
Social network is like a pub. People are talking. Social network is like a ‘Corso’, the main street boardwalk where you hang out with your friends and their friends. You can also do some business with all this people there if you feel like it. But do not really have to, since you can check how your mates commented the game yesterday. And tell them how YOU think your home club should have played.
After you got used to the way of communication that the social networks or let you by broadcasting YOUR message to the masses, the idea of browsing boring listings of the jobs on the job sites simply isn’t that appealing any more.
Social Recruitment is born simply because people are far more active on the social networks than on job boards. If Twitter wouldn’t have that many visitors and users it would be impossible to hire staff there. But the sheer volume of users on Twitter makes it a platform where you really can hire staff with the most crazy restriction anyone have ever imposed on the recruitment process – communication limited to 140 characters (spaces included!!!). Facebook is probably the platform with the largest number of useless, and distracting applications but the fact that the number of active users is larger than most of the countries in the world – makes it a perfect sourcing application for a large number or positions. LinkedIN is specialising for the recruitment itself – the social network of professionals. Even their Jobs section isn’t visited as much as all the others since it is simply boring. Visitors expect more from the social networks then the boring jobs listings. They want to contribute. They want to read other peoples contribution. They way to confirm their decisions by getting the independent views from other people with similar conclusions.
After the recent success of the Irish Recruiters LinkedIn Group’s first conference – The Future of Recruitment – Part 1: The Road Ahead, Declan Fitzgerald has been planning already for Part 2, and after repeated requests to hold Part 2 before Christmas, Declan is now aiming for the 18th of November as the time to run the event and try get the Irish Recruitment industry together again to discuss what are the challenges currently facing our industry and what is the future of recruitment.
Declan is in planning phase at the moment but he has confirmed that Alexander Mann will be giving their RPO prospective on the theme as well as EMC from Cork will be discussing why they want a Cloud ATS and how they are going about implementing it. There will also be more presenters on the day but they have not been confirmed yet. To learn more please visit, Declan’s blog: the Irish CyberSleuth and also you can follow updates on Declan’s Twitter account. I’ll also keep you up to date with any other news I learn in the future about the event.
Hopefully, it will be another great event for networking, learning and debate.
Irish Recruiters LinkedIN Group got together in the a form of a Recruitment Conference.
It was great to see so many friends together, thank you all for coming!
We all need to say a BIG: Thank You to Declan Fitzgerald who organised it all again so well!
Pictures? Well this time around I decided I will mail you the pictures – and only the ones you are on! Just put the comment below and I’ll mail you all the photos you are on. I emailed some nice photographs to your mailboxes already, so check there first. This is just out of a respect for all of you who joined us for a pint afterwards. Please no funny faces to the camera anymore! :)
When the world’s largest professional social network is at the same table with the country’s largest jobs site and the largest recruitment agency, all organised by the world’s largest (richest) IT company… it has to be interesting. Even in the extremely sad times like these. 3 out of 2 recruiters have been made redundant in the last 9 months. I guess the room would be fuller if the conference took place a year ago.
What I took from the conference is that the social networks definitely ARE the most important recruitment tools. LinkedIN is the most important although having so slow penetration in Ireland. Less than 150 000 registered, and only a small percentage of that with a useful profile (from the recruitment perspective).
Job Boards still dominating the market but quickly losing their prior historical dominance. Recruitment advertising fees are dropping, and also disappearing with RecruitIreland.com leading that avenue.
Recruitment agencies are changing their offerings and repositioning themselves in the recruitment process. From all we have heard on the recruitment conference and especially on the ‘After Party’ – if you know how to use Twitter to source the candidates, there is a great future for you in recruitment!
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Irish Recruitment Conference
Reminder: Today is the last day to get a discount for the tickets for the Irish Recruitment Conference: The Future of Recruitment – Part 1:The Road Ahead!
Save 25% on the ticket by buying today. Go and get yours now! See you there!
- Don’t be too technical or industry specific in your profile
- Don’t jump on a social networking site and give the perception that you’re desperately looking for a job — just “taking” and not “giving”
- Don’t wait until you’re laid off before building out your social networks and staying active
- Don’t forget to check out your “online presence” or “personal branding” to make sure nothing embarrassing shows up when you Google your name
- Don’t forget the No. 1 goal is an in-company referral and you must be willing to take action outside your comfort zone to get one
- Don’t spend too much time in front of the screen. Phone calls and face-to-face meetings are vital
- Don’t be afraid to reach out to anyone on the Web in your targeted area — ask questions, suggest products, share information
- Don’t expect to log on and find a direct lead, because the best tips often come from someone on the network who is several times removed from you
- Don’t forget to stay engaged in your field, keep up on the latest news, products and services. Check out start-ups, which can be a great place to find a job if you act fast
- Don’t try to make friends or contacts with everyone you can on the networks; make sure it’s someone you know or have something in common with