Few new features LinkedIn should consider implementing

Recruitment continues to be a paradox from one angle, where thousands of recruiters are struggling to hire enough talent, on the other side most suitable candidates left out from the radar of recruiters who are desiring this talent. The simple reason behind this is, as a recruiter you just can’t spot all the possible job seekers for any given job with the tools and mechanism you have, in the same way job seekers cannot manage to come under spotlight at the right time. Social recruiting tools like LinkedIn is supposed to reduce the gravity of this paradox,as of today it is far from what can possibly be done. Throughout the transformation, from print media driven recruiting to digital, social recruiting the only key metric changed is "time to hire" rest of the problems almost remains the same. There is huge business opportunity for LinkedIn in trying to solve this problem.

As someone who deal with and live in this paradox every day, I think  features discussed in this post might work well.

 

Let candidate choose to show contact details to his “preferred employer” (Only)

Recruiting through LinkedIn is exciting, there is an element of hide and seek all the time. As a recruiter when you stumble upon to some profile, you know the candidate great but you cannot do anything but send an Inmail and wait for his response. It consumes enormous amount of time and Inmail response rates are not more than 40%, in case someone is using LinkedIn significantly. Most candidates do not respond for different reasons which is fine but I am worried about candidates who are interested in the job and could not respond in time, by the time he/she responds the job is filled. Being able to talk is much more effective than sending an email/Inmail. Why not simplify it, LinkedIn is not a regular jobsite so you may not want to build a feature that blatantly shows contact numbers, fair enough but at least let candidates chose to show his mobile number only few selected employers of his choice.

Take an example, you are candidate and would not want to miss an opportunity to work for SpaceX labs and you will be willing change job at any point of time in career to just to work for this company. We all have dream companies like that. LinkedIn should make your life easier by showing your contact details to only this company where recruiter can easily find your mobile number and call you. On face of it, it may sound like feature which will eventually kill Inmail but it won’t. Inmail consumption may reduce initially but the overall adoption of LinkedIn will grow faster and significantly. Today a lot of employers does not prefer a paid recruiter account on LinkedIn primarily because it is a slow process and does not give contact details as compared to the regular jobsites. Another most important differentiator is the cost, In India LInkedIn license costs at least 3 times to Naukri subscription, when it is not providing the basic feature that is available on jobsites it does not make any business sense. You cannot run a long standing business only with rich customers LinkedIn needs small, medium players to become its consumers win the war and stand strong. See the illustration below.

Enable job seekers with intricate information and analytics

LinkedIn has potential become the one stop solution for candidates, as on today it is just another medium between recruiters and candidates, the moment this connection is established job of LinkedIn ends. Candidates have to further depend on other sites like Glassdoor to check and gather information about a particular employer and that too candidates will only come to know the opinions of others not really facts.

Before attending any interview candidates tend to do a lot of homework in knowing what they are getting in to starting from what would be the nature of interviews to how would  my future look like if joins this company, where does this job change may potentially take me in few years, what would be my future prospects. It will be an amazing help for candidates to get data from LinkedIn related to all those, it helps them make the decision faster and very well informed decision.

Say you applied for role , will be good to get information as below.

LinkedIn got more information about any employer in the world than any other site, probably it knows more about a certain employee than their employers do like academics, previous employment history, roles played before, where did someone join after working for an X company, is there any trend in employee migration from one company to another. It will be really useful if candidates get to know this information once he/she applies for a role/accepts an Inmail from a given employer.