In today’s interconnected world the job of job hunting has changed dramatically. The old way of recruiters and recruiting firms has given way to social networking and a better chance of getting seen by hiring managers. As an example, how does one get noticed by, let us say, Accenture’s several hundred hiring managers in one shot? And why will Accenture pay 30% of the gross paycheck to recruiters when they can get the same people on social networks, such as LinkedIn, free of cost? Does it make business sense anyway to pay that 30% any more? I don’t think so. The game has changed. To get the attention of John Campagnino, Accenture's head of global recruiting, or Kaushik Nag, global head of recruiting at BMC Software, you'd better be on the web, and more specifically, on LinkedIn.
If you don't have a profile on LinkedIn, you're nowhere in the market. You can’t be seen. You are as good as a non-entity when it comes to the job market. Partly motivated by the cheaper, faster recruiting he can do online, Campagnino plans to make as many as 40% of his hires in the next few years through social media. Says he: “This is the future of recruiting for our company.” I am sure Kaushik will have a similar opinion! In today's job market an invitation to "join my professional network" has become more obligatory – and more useful –than swapping business cards and churning out résumés.
More than 60 million members have logged on LinkedIn to create profiles, upload their employment histories, and build connections with people they know. Visitors to the site have jumped 31% from last year to 17.6 million in February 2010. More than 25% of them are senior executives. Every Fortune 500 company is represented. That's why recruiters rely on the site to find even the highest-caliber executives. I read somewhere that Oracle found CFO Jeff Epstein via LinkedIn in 2008. I got my present job through LinkedIn 2 years ago!
The reason LinkedIn works so well for professional matchmaking is that most of its members already have jobs. And this is the population hiring managers want to poach on, the so-called “passive job seekers”. In this environment, job seekers can do their networking without looking as if they're shopping themselves around. The recruiting industry is built on the fact that they are hard to find. LinkedIn has changed the dynamics completely. It's the equivalent of a little black book -- highly detailed and exposed for everyone to see. A cadre of happily employed people uses it to research clients before sales calls, ask their connections for advice, and read up on where former colleagues are landing their new jobs.
The main difference between LinkedIn and other social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter is that while Facebook is for fun, family and friends, and Twitter allows only 140 characters per post thereby severely limiting one to post their profile, LinkedIn not only is a professional networking site but also it does not have any character limits to the content. So posting a good professional profile is easy.
The views expressed above are solely those of the author.
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