idaconcpts » LinkedIn Applications

Using the True Networking Power of LinkedIn

Damian Davila — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:42:41 +0000

A summer 2009 survey conducted by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com indicates that only 26% % of U.S. HR professionals use LinkedIn to search for the names of their job candidates. This percentage is lower than the 29% of U.S. HR professional that use Facebook and the 47% that use Google for the same purpose.

This statistic reveals the fact that there appears to be a misunderstanding of the true networking power of LinkedIn by HR professionals.

So, what is LinkedIn? Here’s the answer from its developers:

However, HR pros seem to be missing the vision of LinkedIn’s founder, Reid Hoffman (yes, that’s a link to his LinkedIn profile). On August 25, 2008 , in an interview with Fortune, Hoffman explains that the main goal of LinkedIn is to improve the life of its users. In his own words:

What I realized before PayPal was sold was that there was going to be a confluence of two forces.

One was how the world of work is changing — every individual is now somewhat entrepreneurial. They’re getting the next gig themselves.

The other was the Internet, which could empower all these individuals to establish profiles online so that people can find them. You’d be able to use your network to get access to people to better chart your path.

I started LinkedIn because changing people’s professional lives is a massive transformation.

Why are HR professionals not using LinkedIn as often to screen job applicants?

Because LinkedIn’s true networking power takes time to develop and HR professionals have little time. An important caveat is that LinkedIn is only as good as your networking power is already at LinkedIn. I’m just not talking about having several contacts, I’m also referring to the number of groups and associations that you belong to in LinkedIn.

HR Professionals: In LinkedIn you need to go far beyond adding people to your network. You need to engage with them in discussions regarding current events. You need to ask questions. You need to provide advice. If you’re active in several forums and groups, you can get a lot of useful information.

A good LinkedIn profile may provide all the information you need about a job applicant in just one place: CV, communication and writing abilities, contact information, and references.

It is not surprising that when you take a look at the top reasons that U.S. HR professionals hire a job applicant after seeing their social network profile that most of the reasons are available on LinkedIn.

In conclusion, LinkedIn is a powerful networking tool that would make the task of screening job applicants easier for HR professionals, but it requires time to develop.

How HR Professionals Analyze Your Facebook Profile

Damian Davila — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 23:11:17 +0000

In August 14, 2009 I wrote about how web visitors are flocking to career sites such as Hotjobs and Monster during the current recession. More than 65 million visitors checked out career sites in June 2009. This is great news for career sites because that provides a lot of leads for the HR professionals that post jobs at career sites.

How do HR professionals check on those leads?

Turns out that about 45% of HR professionals in the United States are using at least one social network to check on those leads.

Undergraduate and graduate students, listen up!

That means that your career counselor is not kidding around when saying that you need to clean up your social network pages.

How HR Professionals Analyze Your Facebook Profile

These are the top tools that U.S. HR professionals use to screen job applicants. A summer 2009 survey conducted by Harris Interactive for CareerBuilder.com indicates that 47% of U.S. HR professionals use Google to search for the names of their job candidates. 29% of U.S. HR professionals use Facebook and only 26% use LinkedIn.

The findings were more likely to get candidates rejected than hired: 35% of HR professionals said social networking content had caused them to eliminate a candidate, while only 18% reported deciding to employ someone based on a profile.

Take note of the top reasons that a HR professional will reject your job application after looking at your Facebook profile:

It is not a surprise that the 2 top reasons that people get rejected based on their Facebook profile are “provocative or inappropriate photographs or information” and “information about drinking and using drugs”.

However, there are job applicants that really stand out as great candidates after their social networks profiles have been screened. Specifically, HR professionals are looking for a match between the applicant’s personality and the company’s culture.

What are some great social network practices?

Take a look at the list below. Some are very specific to LinkedIn (“other people posted great references about the job candidate”) but the general theme is a good mix of professionalism, creativity, and character.

Permission E-mail Marketing Polling with LinkedIn Polls

Damian Davila — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:56:42 +0000

Since February 2009, I’ve been talking about permission e-mail marketing here at idaconcpts.com because it turns regular e-mails into personal, relevant and anticipated messages. An important part of the work of online marketers is polling because it provides greater insights to our questions and allows us to have better, more educated decision-making.

I have used Surveymonkey in the past and it works great but I have found that LinkedIn Polls allows polling to become more personal, relevant, and anticipated.

LinkeIn Polls is one of the applications that LinkedIn launched in October 2008 and as all of these applications they are free but require you to have a registered account with LinkedIn.

To access LinkedIn Polls you need to first add the application to your LinkedIn profile:

Creating a LinkedIn Poll is very simple and intuitive:

You can submit your poll to either your 1st degree connections or a target audience of professionals in the U.S (this option is free for premium subscribers). I would recommend to stick with the first option (targetting your first degree connections) because this makes your poll personal (“Hey Mike can you take a loot at this?”), relevant (“Susan, your input is important to me because I know your expertise in marketing while we worked together), and anticipated (Linkedin is a site for networking!).

An important caveat is that LinkedIn Polls is only as good as your networking power is already at LinkedIn. However, don’t believe that I’m just talking about having several contacts, I’m also referring to the number of groups and associations that you belong to in LinkedIn. If you’re active in several forums, you can get a lot of responses, and more importantly long threads of valuable qualitative data.

If you do have lots of contacts, LinedIn Polls has made it easy to segment by location and/or industry:

One of the most attractive feature of LinkedIn Polls is that it makes segmentation of your poll results a snap. It provides attractive bar graphs by job title, company size, job function, gender, and age.

One could easily argue that LinkedIn Polls needs options for cross-tabulation ,like Surveymonkey does, and further options for segmentations, but I strongly believe that this application is a great way to gather data fast and to create actionable bar graphs that you can e-mail to your colleagues. More importantly it follows the fundamentals of permission e-mail marketing by making polls more personal, relevant and anticipated.