5 suggestions to LinkedIn : To make it much more powerful Recruitment tool

There is no scope for any doubt about Linkedin’s ability to serve as a good recruitment tool but the current problem with Linkedin seems to be that they want to drive all recruitment activities with Linkedin recruiter or Premium job seeker’s account. The reality is Linkedin may not succeed only with paid services option because of the below reasons.

      Linkedin corporate account is far more expensive than the traditional jobsite’s employer subscription (At least in India – when we compare with Naukri.com who stands as no.1)

      Linkedin is not as effective as jobsites, not popular as well. Recruiting with Linkeidn still considered being a special skill and not more than 10% of total hires come through Linkedin in any organization.

This calls for a special attention to popularize Linkedin more as a recruitment tool; this can only be done through normal user accounts. Here are my recommendations to counter the challenge.

Make the "Search" strong

Though the quality of search results improved a lot over the years but still Linked search is not so powerful for both jobseeker and recruiter. I think Linked development team should realize this fact very soon to try and make it much more productive. Have a check for yourself search for any job with location, you will get a bunch of jobs completely unrelated to your search and few are related to your keyword in way but do not match to what you are looking for. It would have been really fine if Linkedin is Search engine or simply a social networking site, but as they aspire to become stronger recruitment tool it hampers the experience of jobseekers and recruiters too. Hence Linkedin needs to limit search results specifically to keywords just like any other jobsite.

Force users to fill up their Technical expertise /Primary Skill set

As of today more than 90% of the LinkedIn profiles are not good enough to at least have a fair idea on the area of expertise of a candidate. It just provides a high level view about employment and area of work. Linked should target to get these profiles at least to the level of providing sufficient information to screen candidates without having to ask candidates to send their resume. We can understand the business pressures of being a social media site, Linkedin would definitely want to keep the registration very simple and cannot force users to furnish details as it might discourage them from creating an account. Linkedin can afford to do this at later stages for ex : if a candidate is applying for job on .net technology and he/she did not specify this as part of primary skill set then Linkedin should throw an error and ask user to apply only to jobs which matches their primary skill or update primary skill set. Of course I am suggesting them to have something called “Primary skill” which must be a mandatory filed to complete in order to apply for jobs. It makes the life of recruiters easy and much more effective search strings can be framed, eventually the quality of search results will increase. Most importantly recruiters will not be spammed,

     

Preferably in a drop down box like below

Endorsements should not be reduced to the level of “likes” on Facebook

Why dedicate so much of space to something which does not have any importance to either recruiter or candidate. Endorsements have become like a formality, a joke as if it is the “like” button on Facebook. You cannot stop users endorsing each other as a favor, but Linkedin can definitely stop endorsing a person without even knowing him at work. There is no validity for endorsements at all; I get surprised when someone I’ve not met in person so far endorses me for a skill. Let people endorse only if they worked together. If you cannot bring this change right away at least give the control to the users whether to accept or Reject an endorsements, so that whoever wants to keeps their profile genuine, they will be able to do so. It helps in having much reliable information on Linkedin.

Give few premium account privileges to normal users

Linkedin perceived to be a platform for passive Jobseekers, it sounds like someone is running a scared charity program to help jobseekers find a good job without their employer noticing it.Now this myth of passive jobseeker is vanishing gradually, everyone is an active jobseeker, we are no more living in world of people serving for years in one single organization. Consumerism is ruling the world not only in the sense of money but work, brand, work life balance etc. Almost everyone considers changing his job provided the criteria are met. So we have Desperate, Selective and very Demanding jobseekers all of them active, just that options and intention to bargain varies. So by making most useful features available to only for paid services which are most likely used by desperate jobseekers you are not engaging the other major chunk.

Linkedin is not a tool for mass hiring, this makes it extremely imperative for them to be more popular by  giving more meaningful services to users, at least to job seekers.By trying to make money for most of the services, there is always a danger of someone coming into the market offering it for free. We are witnessing an explosion of freeware recruitment management systems already.

      

Become more social

It might sound funny asking a social networking site to get more social.Linkedin is most effective for mid-sized organizations and really helpful for special skill sets than generalized .The one ability of it makes Linkedin so desirable for recruiters is it’s capability to help in building market intelligence. You could capture the details of entire team in a given organization, it is even possible to capture the details of almost all employees if it is an organization of less a than 1000 people.

Linkedin must build on this ability and partner with other social media sites to provide much more meaningful information to users. For ex: it can incorporate the ratings/comments on employers from Glassdoor when someone is trying to fetch information.