I’ve complied a list of the top 25 most connected recruiters on LinkedIn.

To generate this list, I searched LinkedIn for anyone in the world who had one of the following terms in their current title: recruiter OR recruiting OR recruitment OR sourcer OR sourcing OR talent, and I sorted the results by connections. It looks as if you will need at least 20,000 1st degree/direct connections to even crack the top 10!

If you click on each result, you will be taken to their public profile. You might want to connect with them if you haven’t already.

Click here for the full search results on LinkedIn – there are at least 301,384 of them.

If you happen to add “human resources” OR HR to the current title search string, the top 25 results don’t change much, with the exception of the top 4 (2 new results show up there). Also, the total results climb to over 820,000.

You’re on LinkedIn – congratulations!

So, how big is your network?

Without going into a rant on quality vs. quantity (who says we can’t have BOTH?), let’s take a different angle on the size of your LinkedIn network…at your current company, where do you rank in terms of number of connections?

Do you know off the top of your head? Why not?

If you don’t know where you rank at your current company in terms of LinkedIn network connections, here’s how to find out:

How to Find Out Where You Rank In Your Current Company

Go to LinkedIn advanced search and enter in your company in the company field and select “current.”

Then, change the “sort by” from the default of “relevance” to “connections” and hit “search.”

Voila! Now you know where you stand in your company in terms of LinkedIn network size. When I perform that exercise, I can see I am currently the most connected person in my firm.

It’s actually kind of fun to check on other companies to see who the most connected person is:

For example – Deloitte. No surprise here.

Try it yourself – check out some companies, peers, and competitors and see who the top 10 most connected are. You’ll find it’s not alway who you would expect!

If someone claims to be a social recruiting “expert,” IMHO they had better be #1 in their company, or at the very least not behind anyone NOT in recruiting.

How Do YOU Rank?

So, I ask again – where do you rank in terms of number of connections with regard to other people in your organization?

Are you #1? If yes – nice work! It means you’ve taken an active role in building your LinkedIn network. Of course, it could also simply be that no one else in your organization leverages LinkedIn effectively.

If you’re NOT #1 in your company, why not, and who is?

Free LinkedIn Accounts vs. Premium LinkedIn Accounts

As a reader of my blog, I’m assuming you fit somewhere in the sourcing/recruiting/talent acquisition space – and having a decent sized network on LinkedIn allows you to run searches taking full advantage of LinkedIn’s search interface instead of having to resort to the imprecise science of X-Ray searching LinkedIn to view results of people outside of your network.

I say imprecise science because when you attempt to target current titles and/or companies via an X-Ray search of LinkedIn, you’re not actually finding all of the available results. Trust me – you’re not.

Of course, if you have a premium account with LinkedIn or you have access to LinkedIn Recruiter or LinkedIn Recruiter Professional Services,  you may be able to see more (even all) search results.

However, that still doesn’t answer the question as to why you don’t have the largest LinkedIn network of connections when compared to your peers in your current organization.

It’s Not a Contest

No – it’s not a contest to see who can build the biggest LinkedIn network, and there is no magic number of connections you need to have. 

However, LinkedIn isn’t Facebook – it’s primarily a professional networking site. You don’t have to be best friends with someone to include them in your network. In fact, many would argue that it’s beneficial to network with people on LinkedIn you don’t know personally because of the simple fact that it expands your network reach and view.

Is connecting with someone you don’t personally know really any different than going to a live, in-person networking event (or seminar, or conference, etc.) and receiving a list of the contact information of everyone who attended, whether you had a chance to mingle with them or not?

Is having the ability to easily reach out to and network with people you don’t know any less “social” than networking only with people you already know?

It could easily be argued that it’s anti-social to not connect with people you haven’t already met, spoken with, or exchanged online messages with.

Not connecting with someone unless you already “know” them just like having a rule that you won’t talk to someone over the phone unless you’ve already met them in person. Who is to judge what connection has to be made first (phone/in-person/email/LinkedIn)?

Final Thoughts

Do you have to be the most connected person in your company when it comes to LinkedIn? Of course not.

However, it’s a worthy excerise to examine why and how someone else in your company has a bigger network than you, especially if they aren’t in some kind of talent identification and acquisition role (doh!).

If you happen to benefit from an employer that affords you premium access to LinkedIn (e.g., LinkedIn Recruiter) – what happens if you leave your current employer and join a company that doesn’t have LinkedIn Recruiter?

For those who only have a free account on LinkedIn – having a large network can mean not having to run an X-Ray search 95% of the time, regardless of location or skillset searched for. Without a premium account, the question may ultimately be what percent of the LinkedIn database do you want to be able to “see” without having to resort to X-Ray searching?

Connecting with people on LinkedIn with relevant skills and experience (i.e., your target talent pool), whether you already ”know” them or not, has obvious benefits.

However, the benefits of connecting with people who don’t have relevant skills and experience (i.e., NOT your target talent pool) aren’t so obvious. In fact – some people would say it doesn’t make sense to connect with people who aren’t in your target talent pool.

Those people obviously don’t understand the nature of LinkedIn’s 3 degrees of separation – which works magic in many cases! Sometimes it takes connecting to the “wrong people” to get connected to the “right people.”

Contemplate.

I’m very much an anti-hype, anti-bandwagon person.

I neither like to nor want to get caught in the undertow of the emotional rush associated with being excited about something that nearly everyone else seems to be excited about, where everyone celebrates the new and “cool factor” with little-to-no critical thought.

When that next bright and shiny object comes along, it’s all too easy to be blinded by it.

Rest assured I have not been blinded by #socialrecruiting. I’ve been using social media for a little while now (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and blogging), purposefully remaining calm and collected on the subject - choosing to explore the true potential rather than get caught up in the hype. 

So whether you’re a social recruiting evangelist, hater or n00b (I’ve been all 3, not necessarily in that order), you’ll find some value in this post because I am going to strip away all of the hype surrounding social recruiting, demystify it, and cut straight to the heart of the real opportunities associated with using social media for sourcing and recruiting.

So What’s the Big Deal About Social Media and Recruiting?

Many people want to know - what exactly IS the big deal?

Well, from my perspective, the advent of social media affords sourcers and recruiters with easy and unprecented levels of access to more people than ever in the history of recruiting.

For free.

Using just the “Big 3” social networks, recruiters have the ability to find, communicate with, engage, and build relationships with well over 100,000,000 million in the U.S. alone.

That’s kind of a big deal.

Hasn’t Recruiting Always Been “Social?”

That’s always been my question! As if there ever was antisocial recruiting?

“Social recruiting” is simply the use of social media and social networking sites to find, engage, communicate and build relationships with potential candidates with the intent to network and recruit.

Yep, it’s that simple.

However, using social media to communicate and build relationships with potential candidates is no more “social” than using the phone to do the same thing, or actually doing it live and in person (that still happens, right?).

To demystify social recruiting, it is simply the use of specialized Internet-based technologies and websites to perform the same standard and basic recruiting practices that have been conducted over the phone and in person for decades - finding candidates, initiating contact and engaging candidates, and building relationships with candidates.

Social Recruiting: Finding vs. Attracting

Suppose you only use a social network such as LinkedIn to find potential candidates, and you use other means to initiate contact and engage them - isn’t that social recruiting?

Social recruiting purists would say no – that using social media only to identify candidates but not to communicate with them isn’t “social recruiting.”

I don’t think it’s so black-and-white an issue.

If I identify a potential candidate on Facebook or Twitter, cross reference them on LinkedIn to find out where they might currently work, use the phone to initiate contact with them, then invite them to connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn as an additional way for me to stay in touch with them - is that not social recruiting?

I’ll let you decide, but I think the answer is obvious.

Isn’t Social Media Just a Big Waste of Time?

Can a recruiter waste a lot of time using social networking sites? Most definitely. But don’t be silly – social networks don’t waste time, people do.

Carol Rozewell, a VP/Distinguished Analyst at Gartner, explained brilliantly in her “Resisting Social Media is Futile” blog post that, “An employee wasting time on social media is a performance problem. Don’t blame it on social media. Productive employees are too busy with work to spend lots of time in social media having personal conversations. Instead, they use social media as a means to get their work done.”

Enough said.

Social Recruiting Doesn’t Work For Everyone

When it comes to social recruiting – one size does not fit all.

If you’re hiring Information Technology professionals, you can easily use social media for recruiting and get results.   That’s because there are many I.T. professionals using social media.

However, social recruiting won’t work so well for you if a large percentage of your target talent pool isn’t using social media. For example, Jerry Albright has observed that many groups of candidates seem nowhere to be found on Twitter. Jerry’s a recruiter, he’s social, he blogs, he’s on Twitter- and yet recruiting with Twitter still eludes him for one simple reason: the kinds of people he typically recruits for are scarce on Twitter.

When it comes to fishing – you go where the fish are.

When it comes to recruiting – you need to go where the people are. If the people you need to recruit aren’t on certain social networks, you obviously don’t need to go there to be a successful recruiter and to get results.

Social Recruiting at the Corporate Level

Companies have an unprecendented ability to engage millions of potential candidates where they live online – at little to no cost.

As I said before – when you’re recruiting, you go where the candidates are. When you can create a Facebook Fan Page to represent your corporate brand, socialize your hiring needs, communicate hiring events and post videos to attract talent for free on a site where there are over 130,000,000 monthly unique visitors from the U.S. alone (sorry, www.compete.com only shows U.S. data), why wouldn’t you?

When you can create a corporate Twitter profile for free to communicate in real time with 1,000’s of people who are interested in your company, why wouldn’t you? 

No-brainers.

However, companies that limit their “social recruiting” efforts largely to posting jobs on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn aren’t really performing social recruiting in my opinion. Job posting is job posting – there’s nothing “social” about it.  

Final Thoughts

Social media and social networks that enable and facilitate social interaction have without a doubt given recruiters unprecedented access to large populations of potential candidates where they live online, but social media is no more “social” than attending a user group/networking event or simply picking up the phone and speaking with a potential candidate.

Social media simply gives sourcers, recruiters, and employers one more way to find and interact with potential candidates - sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are not replacements for in-person or telephonic interaction.

The basics of the “human element” of recruiting - effectively communicating and building relationships with candidates, understanding candidate motivators, consultative selling, etc. – none of these have been changed or altered by the emergence of social media.

Social media and social networks merely give recruiters a 3rd medium through which they can perform the same thing all good recruiters have been doing over the phone and in person for decades. Having said that, I do think that a recruiter or recruiting organization that effectively leverages all 3 mediums (in-person, over the phone, online) will outperform anyone who is only leveraging any 2 of the 3.

If you happen to be a social recruiting non-believer, please know that you aren’t qualified to say that social recruiting doesn’t work for you or your organization unless you’ve actually tried it in the first place, beyond posting jobs on Twitter and LinkedIn groups and creating a Facebook Fan Page.

Bottom line – you should use recruiting methods that work for you and produce the best results - not what the industry is buzzing about.

Now that we are on our way into exploring the new year, I’ve seen some articles on what’s coming next for the recruiting industry this year, and even as far out as 10 years from now.

When I read one such article written by Kevin Wheeler, I was struck by his comment that although sourcing remains a topic he is interested in, he feels that “the need to conduct in-depth Internet searches and apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases.” 

I was prepared to write an article just in response to that thought, but as I sat down to review his post again on Sunday in preparation for my post, I noticed that Kelly Dingee had commented in defense of electronic talent identification.

In response, Kevin wrote “I think that intensive Internet searching, for most internal recruiters, is a sign of their failure to develop a community of potential candidates. If the position is a unique or one-of-a-kind search, they should probably use a third party recruiter. For volume and routine hiring there should be no need to use anything beyond a network of potential candidates whether proprietary or not. Building that community is what a recruiter’s job is all about – not running searches or becoming a computer nerd.”

Wow. Where do I begin?

Boolean Search is NOT Dead – Nor Will it Ever Die

We are well into the Information Age of recruiting - ”characterized by…the ability to have instant access to… (candidate) information that would have been difficult or impossible to find previously. The idea is linked to the concept of a Digital Age or Digital Revolution, and carries the ramifications of a shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based around the manipulation of information.”

When you need to find information, unless you’re using a single word or phrase (I literally shudder at the thought), there is no escaping Boolean logic. You either want something (AND), you want at least one thing in a list (OR), or you don’t want it (NOT).

The reason why Boolean logic will never die is that it doesn’t get any simpler when it comes to information retrieval. Yes, I said “simple.” We’re not talking SQL here -  we’re talking about 3 very basic operators. There is a reason why Boolean logic is the foundation of ALL modern digital electronics – it’s the simplest fundamental logic!

Of course, if you’re using Google, Bing, or LinkedIn, you don’t have to type AND, as every space is an implied AND, so perhaps many people are unaware that they are conducting simple Boolean searches. However, if you use more than one search word/term you’re still using Boolean logic – it is inescapable.

The Boolean operators of a search are the easy part – the more challenging aspect of electronic talent discovery is the entire process of understanding the hiring need, thoughtfully translating it into an effective search strategy, and adpatively modifying consectuve searches to return results that have a high probability of being excellent potential hires. 

Yes, searching information systems to find candidates requires thinking. Sorry.

Recruiters Do Need to Know How to Perform Electronic Talent Discovery

While every step of the recruiting life cycle is equally important, the fact of the matter is that you can’t build a relationship with (or hire for that matter) a potential candidate that you haven’t identified in the first place. Talent acquisition is dependent upon talent identification.

Recruiters should know how to search information systems to find and identify talent. It’s not about being a “computer nerd” – it’s about the fact that with each passing day, there is more information available about more people electronically, whether it be in a corporate ATS/CRM, a social network, a blog, a press release, a resume, etc. This is a trend that will continue to accelerate – we will never experience a decrease in access to human capital data. 

If a recruiter cannot fully capitalize on all of the human capital data that is readily available and accessible today, they are doing themselves and their organization a considerable disservice, and their organization is at a competitive disadvantage.

When Kevin states that for a corporate recruiter, “If the position is a unique or one-of-a-kind search, they should probably use a third party recruiter” – my question is why? If I was a corporate recruiter, I would never need to use a third party recruiter, primarily due to my ability to leverage information systems and human capital data. I am not bound solely to candidates with whom I have a pre-existing relationship.

More on that in a few paragraphs.

Bottom line: You’re not a full life cycle recruiter if you can’t find your own candidates. Whether or not candidate sourcing should be a separate role or integrated function will be the topic of a future post.

Access to Information is Not Enough

The value of information lies not in the information itself, but in the ability to retrieve the information needed at the appropriate time. Information is of no use or value if it cannot be discovered in the first place.

Having direct access to an unprecedented number of potential candidates via a combination of an ATS/CRM, the Internet, LinkedIn, job board resume databases, Facebook, and Twitter is of no value without the ability to capitalize on that data – the ability to sort through the information and retrieve the right candidates at the right time. 

In part 1 of Dr. John Sullivan’s excellent 3 part series on talent acquisition trends for 2010, he comments that “The challenge moving forward isn’t finding people – that’s too easy…” I agree, in that with ready access to millions of potential candidates, finding people is easy. However, finding the right people at the right time is not, nor will it ever be.

It is all too easy to assume that access to information automatically confers the ability to fully capitalize on that information. It does not.  That’s like saying I’m a great tennis player because I own a tennis racket.

Even if you’ve already built a community of candidates, you still have to be able to find and retrieve the right person at the right time. If you think that a potential candidate has been “found” just because they are already in your ATS or CRM, think again. Having a candidate record in an ATS/CRM only means that the human capital data has been captured.

Many ATS/CRM applications are well-nigh unsearchable – candidates go in, but they don’t come out. Consider the Fortune 500 corporate recruiter who recently admitted to me that it’s easier for her to run a search on Monster, find a candidate based on skill and experience, then cross reference the name in their Taleo Talent Management solution to find the candidate record.

Ouch.

Breaking the Bonds of Pre-Existing Relationships

The Information Age of recruiting, unbeknownst to many people, has enabled recruiters to break the bonds of the pre-existing relationship.

A core responsibility of any recruiter is to build a community of potential candidates. For over two decades, recruiters have been trained that proactively pipelining candidates is the best way to ensure that they will have ready access to the right candidates at the right time. 

However, there are many intrinsic limitations and weaknesses of this practice. What is the likehood that the best candidate available for a given position is already in a recruiter’s pipeline? Also – what happens when a recruiter’s community of potential candidates fails to produce any viable (appropriately qualified, available, and closeable) candidates?

For the first time in the history of recruiting, a recruiter who has the ability to fully capitalize on the huge and ever-increasing volume of the readily accessible human capital data available to them via their ATS/CRM, LinkedIn, online resume databases, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  can almost instantly identify and engage well-qualified candidates with whom they have no pre-existing relationship.

The Information Era of recruiting enables recruiters with solid e-sourcing skills to no longer be limited solely to candidates with whom they have a pre-existing relationship. These recruiters can find and attract the best candidates, regardless of whether or not they have previously identified them.

I’ll let that sink in a bit. It’s deep. 

Social Networking

Nearly everyone in the recruiting industry is buzzing about the opportunity provided by and the importance of social networking. While I enthusiastically engage in online social networking (yes, I’ve even made a hire from Twitter), social networking is simply an evolution of in-person and phone networking - taking what recruiters have been doing for decades in person and over the phone (building and maintaining relationships) online.

While social networks increase access and reach for many recruiters, they do not significantly improve a recruiters ability to quickly find the right people, nor the right people at the right time, unless they are adept at e-sourcing. 

Moreover, as I’ve written before, networking of any kind (in-person, online, referral recruiting) has intrinsically low levels of control over critical candidate variables, and thus a low inherent probability of producing the right candidate at the right time. 

Final Thoughts

The more things change, the more things stay the same.

The human element of recruiting – contacting, building and maintaining relationships with, and consultatively selling to (recruiting) potential candidates – has not changed in the past 20 years, nor is it likely to in the next 20.

What has changed significantly, and will continue to do so, is the level of access recruiters have to people beyond their pre-existing relationships, which is 100% due to evolving and emerging information technology. 

Large corporate ATS’s contain millions of candidates, each of the major job board resume databases has over 20,000,000 resumes, and LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter alone provide access to over 100,000,000 people in the U.S.!

With ready access to unprecedented volumes of potential candidates, the competitive advantage lies in the ability to  search for and find the right people to engage and attract at the right time.

I disagree with Kevin’s assessment that the need to ”apply Boolean logic to searches is no longer relevant in the majority of cases.” However, I wholeheartedly agree with his idea that data mining is an advanced skill that can facilitate recruiting success(on the same level as relationship building, no less). 

The ability to quickly and effectively extract value out of information systems containing human capital data enables a recruiter to be more productive – to do more of what most people consider to be “real recruiting.” Quite simply, the more qualified candidates you can identify, the more qualified candidates you can contact, engage, attract and recruit - with or without pre-existing relationships.

Relationships and recruiting go hand and hand. This has been long-known and well established, and there’s nothing new to discover here. However, the next frontier in recruiting lies in the effective information management – ATS/CRM solutions, the Internet, resume databases, social networks and whatever comes next.   

With more information available about more people on a daily basis, the complimentary need arises to leverage that information to find the people you want and need. The ability to query social network sites, systems, and databases to find these people to engage and recruit is a highly valuable skill and ability, and will only increase in value to organizations who wish to have a competitive advantage in the “war for talent.”

When I deliver presentations on how to leverage LinkedIn to source candidates, I have the opportunity to get a sense of what most people seem to know about using LinkedIn.  Recently I have been making it a point to ask how people tend to sort their search results when searching LinkedIn, and the overwhelming majority leave their results sorting at the default value, which is “relevance.”

I find this especially interesting, because most people do not seem to realize that when you sort your search results by “relevance” on LinkedIn, you are not getting results based solely on the search terms entered – you are getting results ordered by a combination of factors – including your “social graph.” 

LinkedIn’s definition of “relevance” is decidedly different than practically every other searchable source of potential candidates – Monster, Google, Applicant Tracking Systems, Twitter, etc. – and what LinkedIn *thinks* is relevant to you may actually not be based on what you are specifically looking for.

What are Relevant Results?

First, it is important to get to the heart of the term “relevance” when it comes to search results.  

The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines relevance as  ”the ability (as of an information retrieval system) to retrieve material that satisfies the needs of the user.”

When it comes to the philosophical concept of relevance, “relevance is a term used to describe how pertinent, connected, or applicable something is to a given matter,” and can be defined as: ”Something (A) is relevant to a task (T) if it increases the likelihood of accomplishing the goal (G), which is implied by T.”

Therein lies the challenge and the issue - only the person performing the search can actually define what is relevant based on the task they are performing. So how exactly does LinkedIn define what is relevant?

LinkedIn’s Definition of Relevance

Nearly a year ago, LinkedIn announced their new search platform, and they explained that the relevance of search results is affected by each individual’s professional network on LinkedIn:

So, how exactly does LinkedIn determine who is “most likely to be of interest” to you?

I’m not sure if anyone outside of LinkedIn knows the relevance algorithm. We can perhaps safely assume it is determined by some combination of the specific search terms used and the searcher’s personal view on the “social graph” – their 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections - with a strong favoritism towards closer connections. 

That does seem to be a safe assumption, because a Principal Search Engineer at LinkedIn commented to this combination, although without going into specific detail as to *exactly* how LinkedIn determines what is relevant for each search/searcher.

Additionally, exploring LinkedIn’s Learning Center , we can find a brief reference to this combination:

While we see that LinkedIn claims that “relevance” is based on the keywords and the searcher’s network…is it safe to assume that sorting by relevance is a mix of “Relationship” sorting and “Keyword” sorting, as described above?

Is it just me or does anyone else find it odd that only first degree, second degree, and groups are mentioned under the order of results sorted by “Relationship?” What happened to third degree connections? Are group connections ranked higher than third degree connections? 

Scrolling further down the LinkedIn Learning Center page, we find the answer (I hope!):

Okay, so this seems to say that the order of relationships does include 3rd degree connections and that 3rd degree connections are ranked higher than group connections.

However, the verbiage under “Relevance” is confusing – I have to believe that this is simply out of date (pre-launch of the new search platform in 11/08), as this definition of “relevance” makes it sound as if sorting results by relevance is based solely on the keywords used in the search, which conflicts with basically all other documentation I’ve found. 

The $64,000 Relevance Questions

When it comes to sorting results by “relevance,” I would really like to know:

• How are a searcher’s keywords weighed in comparison to the searcher’s connections?
• Could LinkedIn believe the most relevant result is a 1st degree connection but a relatively weak match based on the search terms used (keywords, titles, companies, etc.)?
• Does location have anything to do with the relevance of the results and each person’s “social graph” (e.g., are 1st degree connections in the same metro area ranked as more “relevant” than 1st degree connections elsewhere?)?

The answer to those questions would be quite enlightening!

Sorting by Keyword

As I mentioned earlier, from my own informal research, it seems that a great many people never even touch the “sort by” option list. I believe that this is mainly because they assume “relevance” is returning results based solely on the keywords they’ve entered. Which we now know is wrong.

However, we can’t really blame these folks or judge them too harshly because for just about any other database or system they have access to (job board resume databases, their ATS, Twitter, etc.), “relevance” IS based purely on the keywords used in the search.

I have found that a quite a few people are surprised to find out that LinkedIn’s “relevance” isn’t based purely on their search terms (keywords, titles, companies, etc.). The good news is that LinkedIn does offer the ability to sort results based on the keywords only (see image below).

You can also do this after you’ve executed the search:

Many of you probably already knew that – but you would be surprised at how many people don’t, or don’t even think to change the default results sorting from “relevance” based on their understanding of and experience with sorting results by “relevance” with every other system they search.

As a social network, it is nice to be able to search LinkedIn for people based on a combination of keywords and their relationship to you – when you are looking to identify potential candidates, it can make a great deal of sense to start with people with whom you have closer ties.

However, to many sourcers and recruiters, the most “relevant” people returned from a search are those who most closely match the search criteria they specified through their keywords, titles, and companies, not how closely they are connected to them on LinkedIn. 

The $64,000 Keyword Question

When it comes to sorting results by “keyword,” I would really like to know:

• Are keywords found in certain fields weighed more heavily than others (e.g., titles vs. summaries vs. experience descriptions vs. specialties…), and if so, how?

The Top 4 Keyword Relevant Results in the United States

I was just checking to see how many U.S. profiles there are on LinkedIn (by not entering any search criteria, selecting “located in or near,” selecting “United States,” and leaving the zip code BLANK) and I decided to sort the results by keyword.

Now this is interesting because I didn’t actually enter any keywords – I left every field on the advanced search form blank – the only option selected was the country.  Here is what LinkedIn considers the top 4 most relevant results in the U.S. based on keywords when there aren’t any keywords:

Interesting insights into LinkedIn’s search algorithm, right?  Please try this yourself, and let me know if you get the same top 4 results when you sort by keyword.

Final Thoughts

Please check with your peers and friends in the recruiting and staffing industry – ask them if they ever change the results sorting on LinkedIn from the default of “relevance.” You may be as surprised as I have been lately at how many people don’t realize that what LinkedIn thinks is relevant to them may not actually be.

I personally prefer to sort my LinkedIn search results by keyword, not relevance. This is because I want to see the best matches LinkedIn can offer based upon my search criteria (keywords, titles, and companies, etc.), regardless of how they are or are not connected to me. If they’re not connected to me, they are only an X-Ray away.

For anyone without premium access to LinkedIn, which means they are limited to viewing only the first 100 results of any given search, it is important to know that sorting by “relevance” may prevent you from seeing the people who may actually be the most relevant based on your search terms. This can happen any time when the people who best match your search criteria who are not in your LinkedIn network are pushed to the bottom end of the results – perhaps past result #100 – and become unviewable without premium access.

Regarding LinkedIn SEO, I’ve recently seen a presentation detailing how LinkedIn users can dramatically affect their profile’s search rank - I would advise you to thoroughly research any such claims and the information presented (such as which fields make a difference to search rankings and the specific impact of recommendations on keywords) - a good amount of the information may in fact not be accurate (at least not according to sources at LinkedIn). If you feel you have accurate info with regard to whether or not/how certain fields (e.g., titles vs. summaries vs. experience descriptions vs. specialties…) are weighted more heavily, please let me know!

And for those who’ve read all the way down here – is it just me, or did LinkedIn remove the ability to sort results by # of connections a while ago, only to sneak it back in? When did this happen?

I literally just noticed it while writing this post – they did remove sorting results by # of connections as an option for a period of time – I am not imagining that, am I?

Ever wonder how many executives are on LinkedIn?

How about accountants, software engineers, ”Big 4″ employees, or people with TS/SCI clearances? 

Well I did. So I decided to run a number of searches for common titles in information technology, finance and accounting, recruiting and human resources, business development, social media, and administrative support and publish the results for the world to see.  I also searched for “Big 4″ employees, people that mention specific security clearances, and executives of all types to see how many results would be returned, and I broke the results down by global/U.S. totals.

Method

Unless otherwise noted, I searched specifically for current titles while using LinkedIn’s advanced search interface. When I created the searches below, I was not trying to be totally exhaustive – I chose to target a sample of some of the most common titles. 

Total LinkedIn Users

First, let’s take a snapshot of how many LinkedIn profiles exists at the time of this post:

Total U.S. Profiles: 21,688,563

It’s a simple little trick to find that number – just choose Location: Located in or near, and leave the zip code field blank and you can effectively search all U.S. profiles.

Unfortunately, you can’t accomplish the same thing to search for total global profiles. I tried leaving all search fields blank and hitting “search” – but I only got results from my network – this is what LinkedIn told me:

Entering a keyword would defeat the purpose of finding all profiles, so for now, we’ll have to settle for Linkedin’s published figure of 40,000,000+ total LinkedIn users.

And now, on to the searches and their results…

Information Technology

“software engineer”  – 308,044 total, 145,966 U.S.

(”software engineer” OR programmer OR developer) (Java OR J2EE) – 91,973 total, 38,299 U.S.

• Note - I entered (Java OR J2EE) into the keyword search field

(”software engineer” OR programmer OR developer) (.net OR C#) – 67,998 total, 30,299 U.S.

• Note - I entered (.net OR C#) into the keyword search field

(”business analyst” OR “systems analyst” OR “system analyst”) – 244,648 total, 141,732 U.S.

“network engineer”- 51,952 total, 34,239 U.S.

(”system administrator” OR “systems administrator” OR “network administrator”) – 99,009 total, 60, 254 U.S.

(DBA OR “database administrator” OR “database engineer”) – 60,366 total, 34,253 U.S.

Managers and Executives

(”project manager” OR “program manager”) – 772, 971 total, 407,119 U.S.

Director – 2,855,521 total, 1,692,267

(VP OR “Vice President”) -1,037,629 total, 854,173 U.S.

President NOT Vice – 609,212 total, 533,114 U.S.

(CEO OR “chief exective officer”) – 383,643 total, 230,706

• Note – there seem to be a great many CEO’s of very small companies on LinkedIn, which may explain why the search results are so high.

(CFO OR “chief financial officer”) – 96,044 total, 62,515 U.S.

All of the above titles combined: (”project manager” OR “program manager” OR director OR VP OR “Vice President” OR president OR CEO OR “chief exective officer” OR CFO OR “chief financial officer”) – 5,582,237 total, 3,645,896 U.S.

It’s easy to see why executive search professionals love LinkedIn!

Finance and Accounting

(accountant OR accounting) – 250,310 total, 168,021 U.S.

controller – 160,667 total, 74,975 U.S.

financial analyst – 70,099 total, 52,266 U.S.

(audit OR auditor OR auditing) – 115,408 total, 60,988 U.S.

Big 4

As current employer:

(Pricewaterhousecoopers OR Pricewaterhouse OR “Price Waterhouse” OR deloitte OR ”Ernst & Young” OR “Ernst&Young” OR “Ernst and Young” OR “KPMG”) – 207,475 total, 76,987 U.S.

Business Development

(Sales OR “account manager” OR “account executive” OR “business development”) – 2,326,236 total, 1,426,562 U.S.

It looks like leveraging LinkedIn for business development isn’t a secret.

Human Resources and Recruiting

(recruiter OR recruiting OR recruitment) – 208,719 total, 132,981 U.S.

(HR OR “human resources”) – 430,988 total, 213,905 U.S.

(sourcer OR sourcing) (recruit OR recruiting OR recruitment OR recruiter OR staffing) NOT purchasing – 2,392 total, 1,577 U.S.

• Note – I entered (sourcer OR sourcing) in the current title field and (recruit OR recruiting OR recruitment OR recruiter OR staffing) NOT purchasing in the keyword field to reduce false positive results. I thought about targeting industry as well, but many sourcers do not select “staffing and recruiting” as their industry, instead choosing the industry of their employer (e.g., Medical Devices, etc.).

Administrative and Executive Support

(”administrative assistant” OR “executive assistant”) – 188,454 total, 160,103 U.S.

Engineers

Engineer – 1,575,828 total, 829,201 U.S.

(”mechanical engineer” OR “electrical engineer”) – 45,194 total, 30,412 U.S.

“RF Engineer” – 5,641 total, 3,246 U.S. 

(”system engineer” OR “systems engineer”) – 128,508 total, 75.734 U.S.

Six Sigma Black Belts

“Six sigma” (”black belt” OR blackbelt) -  40,445 total, 27,184 U.S.

Security Clearances

Secret: secret (security OR clearance) NOT (recruiter OR recruiting) – 17,462 total, 16,066 U.S.

• Note – I would not typically search for (security or clearance) because not all people with a Secret clearance will also mention those terms, but without searching for any titles or skills, “secret” pulls too many false positives, including “Victoria’s Secret,” etc.

Top Secret: (”Top Secret” OR ”TS/SBI” OR “TS/SSBI”) NOT (recruiter OR recruiting) – 9,191 total, 8,503 U.S.

• Note – I experimented with searching for TS as well, but found it pulled many false positives. Also, there are many people who do list a Top Secret clearance, but never mention “clearance,” which is why I excluded the (security OR clearance) from this search.

TS/SCI: (”Top Secret” OR TS OR “TS/SCI”) (SCI OR Compartmented) NOT (recruiter OR recruiting) – 4,132 total, 3,995 U.S.

• Note: LinkedIn pulls the same results for “TS SCI” and “TS/SCI”

Top Secret with Polygraph: (”Top Secret” OR ”TS/SBI” OR “TS/SSBI” OR “TS/SCI”) (poly OR polygraph) NOT (recruiter OR recruiting) – 763 total, 751 U.S.

It is worth mentioning that I am sure that many people who are on LinkedIn and actually DO have security clearances do not always explicitly mention their clearance, so of course – this search exercise can only find those who do. 

Social Media

I searched for the term “social media” mentioned in the current title: 4,213 total, 3,041 U.S.

Then I searched for “community manager” in the current title and social media in the keywords: 446 total, 269 U.S.

Final Thoughts

I hope you found the results as interesting as I did - were you surprised by any of the findings? 
 
Let me know if you would like me to publish the search results for any other title or skillset.

Thanks!

Is LinkedIn a social networking site, a job board, or a little of both?

Most people consider LinkedIn to be a social networking site, or more specifically a professional network service. LinkedIn describes itself as an “interconnected network of experienced professionals.” However, when I take a step back and take an objective view of LinkedIn, I see a great deal of ”job board” functionality with some social networking features.

Before you cry “blasphemy!,” let’s do some research and look at the facts. 

What Exactly is a “Job Board?”

I tried doing some research to find a definition of exactly what a “job board” is, and found that Wikipedia considers Monster, Careerbuilder, Hotjobs, Dice, etc. to be employment websites. According to Wikipedia, an “employment website” is “…a web site dealing specifically with employment or careers. Many employment websites are designed to allow employers to post job requirements for a position to be filled and are commonly known as job boards.”

Common Features of Job Boards

According to INTERNET Inc, ”job boards are usually free for job seekers though there are some exceptions mostly in the realm of upper management and executive jobs. Job ads can usually be found by browsing or through search on keywords, job type and location. Employers usually pay a fee to post job ads… Most job boards also offer employers resume database access for searching out candidates that match specific criteria. Additional services offered by job boards to employers often include: job agents that alert recruiters by e-mail to newly published job seeker resumes that meet specific criteria, …and brand building advertising with e-mail campaigns, banners, buttons and company profiles.”

What LinkedIn Says About LinkedIn

I did some digging and found LinkedIn’s press site. Under the heading of ”What is LinkedIn?,” you can read that “When you join, you create a profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments.”

That sounds a lot like writing a resume.  

Reading further, LinkedIn says, “Through your network, you can:”

Reviewing those bullets, I see a mix of finding and being introduced to a variety of people, facilitating business, and posting jobs.

Towards the bottom of their “About Us” page, LinkedIn further explains, “We also offer a premium version of your accounts that give you more tools for finding and reaching the right people, whether or not they are in your network.”

Hmmm…paying to search through profiles detailing professional expertise and accomplishments…why does that sound so familiar? Oh – I know! It sounds remarkably similar to paying Monster or another job board for the ability to search for resumes. 

Job Search

If you’ve never used LinkedIn to search for jobs, you may be surprised to see how robust their job search functionality is.  Here is a screenshot of a search for the keyword “accountant.” You can see the first 4 jobs that are listed as “LinkedIn Jobs.”  Notice, however, there is another tab labeled “The Web.”

If you click on “The Web,” you get taken to job search results for your keywords from SimplyHired, which is a “vertical search engine” company that is working to build ”the largest online database of jobs on the planet.”

I think that’s a pretty cool feature – to be able to search for jobs using the LinkedIn interface and have the option to expand the results to jobs from outside of LinkedIn from the Internet. An especially nice feature for job seekers is the “Jobs insider” – which allows you to explore people you may already be connected to inside of the companies who posted the jobs you’re reviewing.

Pretty powerful and extensive job search functionality for a “social network,” wouldn’t you say? 

LinkedIn Hiring Solutions

While you certainly don’t have to pay to be able to search Linkedin for candidates, LinkedIn does offer premium “Hiring Solutions:”

Hmm…let’s see - ”find the best job candidate fast,” “post a job today,” “find more candidates,” and “empower your corporate staffing team.” Is it just me, or doesn’t that sound like job board speak?

Would you like to see more? Here we see exactly how many candidates you can see per search at each price point, as well as how many saved alerts you can get to “deliver a weekly list of new qualified candidates.”

What’s Your Verdict?

Now that you’ve seen all of the evidence, what’s your verdict?

Conclusion

LinkedIn is definitely not an “employment website,” because it is not a website that deals “specifically with employment or careers.” There is no doubt that LinkedIn is used HEAVILY for employment/career related activity - I’ve seen estimates of 500,000 + recruiters on LinkedIn (click here for the results of a simple search for a few common recruiting and HR titles yielding 545,000+ results). However, LinkedIn is certainly not restricted to, nor solely defined by employment/career related activity, as employment websites are.

LinkedIn undeniably has some very cool and useful features that job boards don’t offer, including InMail, recommendations, network connections (being able to see the people other people are connected to), groups, Answers, etc.

However, when we compare many of LinkedIn’s people search (free and premium), pay-for-job-posting features, and LinkedIn’s own self-description to Internet Inc’s definition of job boards, there is a striking similarity:

• Free for job seekers
• Job seekers can browse through or search for jobs based on on keywords, job type and location.
• Employers pay a fee to post job ads
• Employers and recruiters can pay for access to search for candidates that match specific criteria
• Search agents can be configured that alert recruiters by e-mail to newly published profiles that meet specific criteria
• Companies can use LinkedIn for brand building with company profiles

My verdict is that I think that LinkedIn is essentially a job board in a social network’s clothing - which is not a bad thing! “Job board” is not a four letter word – job seekers need to find jobs, research employers, etc., and companies need to find quality talent – this will never change. I think LinkedIn basically beat the traditional job boards to the punch by having all of the standard job board functionality PLUS a buch of cool social networking features.

LinkedIn was smart – they built the social network first, people came, THEN they added in the job board functionality.  Brilliant!

Non-Standard Descriptors and the Role They Play in Social Media

Article by Valerie Scarsellato, Sr. Sourcer at Intel Corporation
Co-written by Glen Cathey

Sourcing has always been a significant component in the recruiting lifecycle. However, in recent years, sourcing has taken a giant step into the forefront and has become recognized as the solid foundation at which successful recruiting rests upon in order to identify and secure top-level talent, no matter what industry you may be supporting.

One of the newest tools available for sourcers and recruiters to leverage to find candidates is Social Media (SM). These days, it seems as if nearly everyone from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, to inventors in various fields, to the grandmother of your best friend has a Myspace or Facebook page or a LinkedIn or Twitter profile.

Twitter happens to be my personal preference in the SM realm. It also happens to be the fastest growing Social Media application at 1200% in the past year!

Although some people are still discovering and testing the waters of the Twitterverse, a diverse and large population (over 14M visitors in March – surpassing LinkedIn!) spanning nearly all industry segments has already fully jumped on to the real-time messaging bandwagon in order to share information or blurt out a piece of nonsense rolling around in their head.

Understand Social Media Users

With the significant levels of attention and traffic being driven by Social Media, it’s critical for sourcers and recruiters to understand how to best utilize SM for talent identification. Technology is ever-evolving and those of us in sourcing/recruiting/talent acquisition roles (even we have many titles!) are constantly having to play catch-up with those that create each new SM application.

After attending one of Glen’s focused and information-packed FREE webinars, I had an epiphany. It’s true - we need to build the right search strings in order to filter through and find the right people we are targeting. In order to do that effectively, I realized that we as sourcers need to understand the psychology of the people we’re searching for and be aware of how they think of and refer to themselves in order to return highly relevant results when searching Social Media.

Social Media Offers a Creative Outlet

Social Media is a relatively new outlet where professionals of any industry can be creative and a little looser with how they refer to themselves. There’s definitely a drive for people to look for cool and hip new ways to describe who they are and what they do. SM, which is informal, dynamic and somewhat voyeuristic, enables people to create alter-ego profiles for friends and peers to view and delight in.

On a standard resume or on a professional social networking site such as LinkedIn, most people will refer to themselves by their industry-standard titles such as Programmer, Developer, Engineer, Marketer, etc.  However, when it comes to Social Media, many people purposefully avoid “corporate” and resume-level descriptors and ”tag” themselves using more informal language that results in a more personalized identity, rather than conforming to industry-standard job titles. For example, the computer programmer at work becomes “geek” or “tech nerd” in his/her Twitter bio. While these may not be considered “professional” descriptors, they are important to note in order to be able to effectively target and search for talent on Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. This requires us to shift our way of thinking in the way we search for people.

Twitter and many other SM interfaces have advanced search options or third party applications that enable you to search the “bio” areas of a person’s profile. When searching these Social Media applications, you must be careful not to limit yourself to the “standard” search terms. You must be open to non-standard descriptors such as “geek,” “nerd”, “techie,” “evangelist,” “droid,” “drone,” “junkie,” and “enthusiast” to name a few. In my sourcing efforts I’ve come across all of these non-title descriptors multiple times in people’s bios.

Twitter Demographics

Don’t assume that all of huge Twitter growth (77% - 6M additional visitors in one month!) is coming from 18-24 year old segment – because it’s not. Most of the growth is coming from the 25-34 and 45-54 year old segments! Yes – 45-54 year olds CAN refer to themselves as tech geeks and spin doctors.

Examples of Non-Standard Descriptors – Twitter

Examples of Non-Standard Descriptors – Facebook

Non-Standard Location Descriptors

Sourcers and recruiters also need to think outside of the box when it comes to searching Social Media Applications for candidates in specific locations and challenge their traditional thinking towards standard naming conventions as it relates to locations. Many people with SM profiles are being quite creative when describing where they are from.

Searching profiles on Twitter and Facebook will yield you non-standard, yet recognizable results such as Silicon Valley, Central New York, North NJ, Suburbs of Boston, NoCal, and Southern CA. However, some people take it a step further and utilize popular slang terms - for example: City of Angels, Big Apple, Bay area and Chi Town. There are the even more creative “tweeps” that want to remain mysterious, their location may be “Universe,” “Everywhere,” or “Narnia.” Perhaps even more intriguing is that some people simply list their latitude and longitude via their iPhones.  

Examples of Non-Standard Location Descriptors

When I clicked on her URL, I discovered that she is a software engineer.

When I clicked on her URL, I discovered that she is a web designer.

Save Your Search Terms!

As you search for candidates using Social Media and uncover these non-standard descriptors, I recommend that you create a living document of search terms that are relevant to your hiring needs and profiles, taking special note of which ones may return the best results. While there is a lack of consistency in some of the non-standard descriptors, ”geek” and “nerd” seem to be the new way to describe different flavors of technologists. You will also find that a good majority of these people will have a link to their personal blog, website or Facebook, MySpace, or Linkedin page which may reveal a more detailed view of their professional focus, as can be seen in some of the results above.

Twitter Search Applications

Twitter is my Social Media application of choice, mainly because it provides real-time contact/updates and people are limited to easy-to-digest 140 character “Tweets” that you can follow in a variety of ways. Plus, you are able to direct message (DM) a fellow Tweeter – and in most cases, they will DM you back. When it comes to search Twitter for candidates, you have many options – each week it seems as if new applications pop up for Twitter. Below you will find a partial list of some applications that enable you to search for or keep up with people on Twitter.

Wefollow
Twitter search
Twitterfall
Tweetbeep 
Tweetscan
Twingly
Twellow
TweetGrid
TweetDeck 

Conclusion

If searching Social Media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace is a part of your talent identification and acquisition strategy, you MUST think outside of the box when choosing your search terms, or else you run the risk of adding to the Hidden Talent Pool of candidates you can not find. 

If you search for a location of “Boston”, you simply cannot find people who only mention “beantown,” let alone “restaurant @ end of universe.” Similarly, if you’re searching for a title of “software engineer,” you can not find people who instead refer to themselves only as “tech geek.” 

You can’t find these people using standard search terms, but they are there – you just need to know HOW to find them. Think outside the box.

About the Author
Valerie Scarsellato is a Sr. Sourcer at Intel Corporation in Phoenix, AZ. You can find her on LinkedIn, and if you’re on Twitter and would like to “follow” her, she’s @Musicloverchick. Tweet her up and she’ll follow you back! She rocks!

With the rise in companies effectively leveraging SEM (Search Engine Marketing)/SEO (Search Engine Optimization), vertical job search engines such as Indeed and SimplyHired, and social media campaigns, it seems as if many feel that the ROI of posting jobs on the major job boards has steadily declined.  Perhaps this is where the strong anti-job board sentiment comes from within the recruiting and staffing industry.

However, there is another side to the job board coin – the resume databases. Personally, when I think of the job boards, I think of their resume databases – not job posting. Job posting is job posting – whether it’s on a corporate website, paid job board, a free board, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Indeed.  While it can definitely work, it’s a passive and reactive technique that has a low ROI in most cases with many respondents who do not meet the basic qualificiations of the position posted.

As the positive buzz surrounding social media and social networking sites continues to build and the negative buzz surrounding the major job boards seems to rise, I knew it was only a matter of time before one of the major job boards stepped out of the proverbial box and took an evolutionary step forward.

Enter Careerbuilder’s Applicant Explorer

Back in January, I received an email from Careerbuilder that talked about an interesting new feature called “Applicant Explorer,” and it said that a user with manager rights on your CareerBuilder.com account must log in initially to activate your Applicant Explorer functionality.

Curious, I logged in and activated the functionality to check it out.  What I found is that Careerbuilder has done something quite interesting by introducing Applicant Explorer to people who search for resumes on Careerbuilder’s website, which has over 28 million resumes.

As Careerbuilder explains it, when you run a search against their resume database and begin to review results, not only can you review resumes, but you can also see a snapshot of information available on the Web for that person. The information is gathered from a variety of sources:

• Social networking sites
• Professional and personal blogs
• Personal and corporate Web sites
• Press releases
• Discussion and forum postings
• Articles and news stories published online

Careerbuilder’s claim is that having quick and easy access to this cross-referenced, publicly available data for the candidates you are reviewing saves you time, as there is no need to open other browsers or tabs and perform this research manually from outside of their application. Essentially, you can get a comprehensive collection of a candidate’s Web footprint from within CareerBuilder.com’s Resume Database. 

According to Greg Brass, Director, Profile Search at CareerBuilder, “AE differs from any of the “people search engines” in the fact that we search and match based on a candidate’s entire resume and not just a name. In this way, we can more accurately match the candidate to other web references, ranging from blog postings that better display a mastery of a technical skill set, to a true cross-section of a graphic designer’s entire portfolio (as that graphic designer may only list one or two work examples on a resume).”

So Does It Deliver?

Well, let’s find out together!  I ran about 25 searches for candidates who posted their resume about 90 days to 1 year ago (no current job seekers were used in screenshots) and used Applicant Explorer on a random sample of the results. 

When you select/open a resume that you would like to review, on the left sidebar you’ll see this:

Once you click “Start Applicant Explorer,” you will get web search results that are divided into “matched results” and “expanded results.” Matched results include professional and social networking sites. Expanded results include forums, personal or company blogs, and work done for previous companies. 

Matched Results

Here is an example of what you can see under “Matched Results:”

You can see that it obviously attempts to pull matches from Facebook, LinkedIn, and ZoomInfo in this case. Notice, however, the url under the LinkedIn “hit” – it’s a directory result.  Not perfect - but not bad.  Interestingly, under the “Expanded Results” for this person, I did find the direct LinkedIn profile hit:

I’ve also seen Applicant Explorer attempt to source from MySpace:

Obviously, with less unique/more common names, users will run into the same disambiguation problems they would if they were trying to search Facebook, LinkedIn, or MySpace directly. Will the “real” Richard Lee please stand up?

Expanded Results

Here is an example of what you can see under “Expanded Results:”

You can see that Careerbuilder’s Applicant Explorer uses Live Search to populate “Expanded Results.”

Another one of my searches produced what I thought was very interesting. If you look at the screenshot below, you can see that the “snapshot” version of Applicant Explorer’s Expanded Results pulled hits from the Internet of people other than the candidate I was reviewing, but who had the same email domain. That should raise some eyebrows among the more hardcore researchers. I say cool.

What’s also interesting is that Applicant Explorer also frequently hits on Yahoo! profiles:

Check This Out

I found that for one of my searches, Applicant Explorer returned some results from the Internet that actually listed one of the candidates I found in Careerbuilder’s resume databse as one of the interviewers for a Linux Engineer position posted online. I conducted some cross-referencing research and found that it was a dead on match (the person in question did work at BAE). As you can see below, there are 3 other names listed as people who will be interviewing candidates for the opening. It should not take a “rocket scientist” to figure out what kinds of people would be qualified to interview Linux Engineers. Nice job Applicant Explorer!

Lack of Overlap

Anecdotally, one thing I noticed is that I tried to use Applicant Explorer to dig up Web results for many people with resumes on Careerbuilder – and it came up with nothing. Then I did my own Internet research and confirmed that in most of these cases – Applicant Explorer was “right” in that the people did not appear to have any social media/networking profiles and/or much information about them on the Internet. Certainly not scientific data, or a large enough sample to be significant, but I was personally surprised to come across so many resumes for people that I could not find on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. In fact, I often found myself having to work hard just to find people who did have a decent amount of Internet and social media hits.  

The Downside

There were many times when I found Applicant Explorer to return a large amount of ambiguous, as well as false positive results. In some cases, Web results were obviously for the wrong people, and in some cases, were hits on the same name as the candidate, but from another state. However, it must be said that the same is true of any Internet research.  Try typing a name into Facebook and see how many results you get – and try to figure out which one is the person you’re actually looking for. There are some intrinsic limitations to Internet research, and Applicant Explorer, which uses Live Search, isn’t immune. 

Conclusion

Okay – so is it a big deal that a major job board now empowers you with the ability to perform one-click Internet cross-referencing research to look for potential matches on social networks, blogs, press releases, etc., for the candidates you are reviewing?

I think so. The major job boards have made very few, if any material changes to their service offerings over the past decade. Being able to get Internet and social media search results for candidates whose resumes you are reviewing without having to open another browser and maunally perform the research yourself IS convenient, and it does save some time. Plus, Careerbuilder offers it at no additional cost.

Are all the kinks worked out?  I’m sure they are not.  But that isn’t the point of this post. I am not conducting a formal review of Applicant Explorer – I’m simply letting my readers know about an interesting new feature of a major job board and insight into how it works and what it looks like.

I applaud Careerbuilder for being the first of the major job boards to take an evolutionary step “out of the job board box” and to offer something that leverages social media to help sourcers and recruiters build a more complete picture of the candidates they are reviewing.

Careerbuilder (or any other job board that I am aware of) isn’t trying to compete with social media and social networking applications. At least not that I know of.

HOWEVER, imagine if the big job boards DID implement social networking functionality to their applications – where active and passive job seekers could network with each other. BAM! You’d have at least three instant 20M+ social networks. Anyone from the major job boards reading this? I hope so! It’s time to evolve!

Job Boards vs. Social Media – which is more effective at helping people get jobs?

At least for now, statistics appear to support that job boards are either more widely used to find jobs, or simply more effective at landing people jobs than social networking sites.

According to a recent LinkedIn poll, 4310 people responded and 22% of the respondents used a major (Monster, Careerbuilder, ec.) or niche job board (Dice, The Ladders, etc.) to find their last job vs. 6% who indicated that they landed their last job through the use of a social networking site (LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.).

Here is the link to the poll results.

The Irony

I find it ironic that a poll of LinkedIn users showed that nearly 4X as many people used job boards to find their last job vs. social networking sites such as Linkedin. For those who rant about how social media is “IT” and job boards are old and ineffective, this poll certainly doesn’t support your view, and I suggest you read this post on an objective comparison of job boards vs. social networking sites from the perspective of sourcing and recruiting.

Hype vs. Facts

Don’t get me wrong – I love, support, and utilize social media. Social networking is definitely not a fad – it isn’t going away and will continue to evolve in exciting new ways we cannot even begin to predict. However, it is important to get past the “new” and “cool” and “next big thing” factor of social media, and begin to collect enough data to be able to determine exactly how effective social media is for talent identification and acquisition. Cool? Yes. Effective? I don’t know – show me some data.

I encounter large volumes of anecdotal, unverifiable, non-quantified opinions from sourcers and recruiters who talk about how effective using social media for sourcing and recruiting has been for them. I will hold my opinion until we get past the opinions and generate some real facts and data.

What People Said

If you click the link I provided that takes you to the poll results, you will see that nearly 100 people left comments in response to the poll (95 at the time of this post). Many of the comments speak negatively about the job boards - but you need to keep in mind that 95 comments out of 4310 respondents is only 2.2%, so the comments represent the vast minority. Also, I am not necessarily surprised that some of the comments bash the job boards – it seems that most people who are passionate about social networking are anti-job board, as if they don’t both have value if properly leveraged.  Job boards and social media do not need to be an either/or, black/white scenario – they CAN be effectively leveraged in conjunction with each other.

Another interesting statistic from the poll is the large number (67%) of people who claim they did not use a site to find their last job.  Unfortunately, we’ll never really know how those people found their last job – referrals, networking, newspapers, targeted headhunting (called directly by a recruiter), sites not listed in the poll as an option (such as Craig’s List), etc.  

Conclusion

So far, this LinkedIn poll is the only public data I’ve seen that illustrates how many people have actually landed a job using various websites such as job boards and social networking sites – and the respectable sample size of 4300+ responses definitely gives credible weight to the fact that either more people use job boards to find jobs or they are more effective at helping people find jobs than social networking sites.

If you encounter any solid, verifiable data on the effectiveness of job seekers and/or recruiters in the use of job boards vs. social networking sites for landing jobs and/or hiring people - please let me know.  Thanks!