Down to Business
Personnel recruiting is an old-fashioned business. A recruiter flips through their Rolodex, calling clients who might need new employees. Then, flipping through the Rolodex again, the recruiter contacts individuals who might be good candidates. The best recruiters are matchmakers, carefully marrying their client’s needs to the candidate’s capabilities. It’s a rare skill, or at least it used to be.
A few years ago, my friend Konstantin Guericke (who worked on VRML in the early days) helped to start a social networking website known as LinkedIn. LinkedIn bills itself as the social network for professionals. Your profile is your resume, and you can link your resume to your previous employers (who are also on LinkedIn), your co-workers (again, also on LinkedIn) and so forth, so that your entire employment history becomes a tapestry of links to individuals and organizations. LinkedIn makes everything implicit within a resume explicit – something so useful that LinkedIn has now become the de facto standard for business hiring.
The question for the recruiter is simple: what do they provide that LinkedIn doesn’t? LinkedIn is the Rolodex. It is the connection to the companies and the candidates. It is the matchmaker. Recruiters – who are all using LinkedIn, because their clients use it – are about to be obsolesced by it. They won’t be alone.
All jobs that depend on a high degree of connectivity are about to be obsolesced as all of the rest of us boot into hyperconnectivity. Individuals who specialized as connectors and translators between various communities or businesses will find themselves swept aside as the tools give every one of us the same advantages. This is why the newspapers are collapsing as an industry – each of us is as well-connected as any editor. That wasn’t always true. It is now, and business must adapt or die.
Tags: Business, hyperconnectivity, LinkedIn, obsolescence, recruiting, Rolodex, VRML
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 4:30 am and is filed under Business, LinkedIn, Share This Course, hyperconnectivity, social network. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
December 5th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
but don’t you always need the personal perspective too? the personal recommendation? your reputation – both the employee & employer. the “it’s who you know” comes into it for a lot of jobs. at least in my experience/industry this has always been key. I haven’t worked professionally in other fields though so can’t speak for all jobs, but I think it’s still a key player. does linkedin and similar sites have this aspect to it? (I haven’t tried linkedin) twitter seems to – it’s similar to the ‘wuffies’ social currency I think?
[Reply]
mpesce Reply:
December 5th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
@kath, the thing is, the personal recommendation comes through LinkedIn more reliably than it came through the personal networks. Because the links are explicit, so are the recommendations.
[Reply]
December 6th, 2009 at 1:59 am
I have never gotten a gig off the web. I’m totally serious. Every gig I’ve ever had has been the result of a personal connection. Every single one. I have a website to point people to once they’ve met me just to show that I’m a web-savvy person.
People who find me find me because they’ve met me in person or because they’ve heard about me from someone else. Maybe my web strategy just totally blows, but every gig I’ve ever had has come through a real person. Of course, I haven’t logged into LinkedIn in about a year
[Reply]
December 7th, 2009 at 7:04 am
I don’t think LinkedIn shall appear to be the soap bubble some claim it to be. It becomes more and more institutionalized in Europe. I’m from Belgium, working for a large education company, and we have found some of our very specialized teachers through LinkedIn. Which works in a very different fashion than Facebook. You could say FB = network of communities, a gigantic amount of noise and sometimes useful communication, where privacy is a personal matter; while LinkedIn is like you say Marc, a rolodex, or I’d call it the Yellow Pages where all information is visible, and more importantly where people meet FoFs easily. This doesn’t replace real life meeting of course, but it takes away the initial barrier amongst strangers. It seems, though that FB is evolving from a community tool (linking individuals who share values and belief – Gemeinschafft) to a corporate tool (impersonal, formal, and instrumental social links – Gesellschafft). The analysis is from sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies, who made the distinction in the 1800s.
From January on I’m assigned to revamp the digital communication at my employer’s, which includes integrating FB, LI, Twitter but also examining hundreds of potential channels like Tumblr, Stubleupon, Xing, Delicious, Friendfinder, Netlog etc. Personally I’m a user of Blogmarks and LibraryThing.
Bottom line – I think first meetings happen more and more online. Reputation and credibility have become dependant of the comments of the communities someone is involved with.
[Reply]