That was the entire reason I figured the guy was a good target for the LinkedIn ad. Excellent strategy -- even those who dislike LinkedIn have to be active on it to sift through 150+ resumes.
I imagine the candidates were sorted digitally at multiple points to narrow things down and share among those hiring. During the arduous process the weary workers take their glance away from the screen to relax for a second only to notice their company's name -- or bosses face in an odd place on the web page they now have memorized from screen burn-in and that's precisely when this ad is almost (IMO not almost) guaranteed.
Same thing happened to me, but with medical device companies. Right after I accepted a position, I was bombarded with ads from competitor companies for essentially the job I was just hired into.
Either it's coincidence, or it's a feature that LinkedIn offers to its clients. Either way, I'm not looking rn.
> Since he's only targeting 15 companies doing a quick search on LinkedIn for HR/recruiting types at those firms and sending a message like that could probably be done in under an hour, and I'd think it might be a bit more effective than the ad.
If you do several targeted searches like this in a month LinkedIn now blocks the results and says "Looks like you are a power searcher, upgrade to premium to see results". It even blocks the "people also viewed" results on individual profiles. Makes it nearly impossible to actually find a number of specific recruiters.
That's essentially what they're doing! They've got an automated form. The recruiter's job is to screen linkedin profiles for qualified candidates; The tedious bit of the mail (two keypresses and typing their name) is just gravy.
I'm not convinced. To me, LinkedIn is exacerbating the problem rather than providing any help. Instead of trolling Monster and spamming anyone with a resume out there, they're doing keyword searches on LinkedIn and spamming anyone whose name shows up.
I really like Linkedin for a simple reason of showing me which big companies operate and are hiring in my city/country. I would never have guessed that some companies operate over here (e.g. Oracle).
I then also really like one local website that shows which startups are hiring. The tone of the ads is very different, and there are no huge companies like Oracle or HP, but a ton of companies I don't even know existed.
What I think are gimmicks that won't work:
- asking candidates for tech skills and matching them with skill requirements of a job ad (been done a million times, never works for anything more than superficial word matching)
- trying to pre-screen candidates so that you can boast great quality of job applicants (I'll simply browse your companies and apply directly to them, not bothering with your system. If I can't see the companies, I'll pass. I'm not desperate to waste time on your skill checks)
- Not showing names of the 'amazing companies' who put the ads on your site (been done a few times, a useless gimmick, I'd never respond to an unknown company unless I were desperate for a job).
What I would love:
- Set up a "follow a company" watcher so that it gives me a breakdown of "these are the job positions opened/closed within the last $time_period", "they started hiring X% more of $position", etc. Simply data about company, or even a city. I would pay for that feature, provided the site was large enough to have meaningful statistics.
Ok this was riotously funny, but in defense of LinkedIn, it's a great place to hire and a great place to get a job if you take the time to write a quality, genuine profile — which is certainly a rarity and makes good people stand out.
I just ended a hiring campaign on LinkedIn. The stats were that it lasted 35 days, cost $704, our job ad was shown to 1001 people, and 233 applied through the platform.
I didn't keep exact stats of qualified / non-qualified people, but there were at least 5 people I thought were wow good, and another dozen or two that I wasn't sure immediately about but who were possibly really good. We hired two people.
These numbers outperformed their algorithm — they estimated that we'd get 40-60 applications for $600 across 30 days, and we got considerably more. I think our ad was pretty good and unusual, it was a condensed version of our team hiring page —
As for whether "fake social networker" cred helps... I don't think so. I make a quick checklist of things I'd skim rapidly for when looking at profiles to do first pass analysis. Basically, I'd look for any sense of ownership, service, or self-direction.
Things like genuine volunteer activities, excellent academics, leadership roles in student clubs are all obvious examples.
But actually, there were a bunch of things that are doable for everyone that I looked for, and which surprisingly few people do.
For instance, the vast majority of candidates wrote their profile in first person tense. "I'm a skilled marketer with X years of..." or "I'm looking for a job doing..."
Very few people wrote in any second person tense at all. EG: "If you're looking to hire a marketer and you have a great company, I'd love to help you develop your..."
I also saw only 2-3 profiles out of 300 that mentioned being happy, smiling, or service oriented. One guy didn't have any fancy brand name education or work experience, but he wrote something like, "I did this job with a smile every day and looked to make everyone I worked with happy." Okay cool, yes, I'd be delighted to talk to you.
Your culture will vary of course, but I was also impressed with people that had a mix of any kind of art/aesthetics alongside any math/engineering/analytical pursuits, and noted anyone who mentioned a disciplined history of sports, martial arts, or athletics.
What didn't factor much at all for me were the self-descriptions of jobs (I skimmed briefly to make sure they weren't a total non-fit, but otherwise don't really trust it) and in the Hiring Portal, you can't even see how many connections someone has easily. Or maybe you can, but I must have just parsed over it if so — I didn't notice it once.
I was skeptical of Linkedin for a long time. The "LinkedIn: The Game" thing. But it's a legitimately great way to put good opportunities in front of people looking for a new job, and a good way to seek companies doing what you're interested in if you're jobseeking. I'm legitimately very impressed with Linkedin excited to work with the two people that joined the team. In my book, a very good use of $700 and 15 hours.
I definitely would expect real photos of the person on LinkedIn, and everyone I know who hires will look on LinkedIn as a confirmation of the resume. Not sure if this is a vector to enable bias or not, but it’s a reality of hiring for many.
It's so funny... I've had a list of potential new employers ever since I re-opened my linkedin profile to "semi-open for opportunities" a year ago or so, and over time, every single one of them has basically disqualified itself with horror stories. I'm probably not looking hard enough, as I guess I'm only hearing about the opportunities that are needing to advertise heavily due to being lousy places to work.
What's the impetus for headhunters to do all this legwork though? Just like noone got fired for buying IBM, the headhunters at large FAANG almost always go for the shiny, smiling LinkedIn profiles.
It could signal that this person goes against the grain, maybe has a disagreeable personality, too cool to join the herd, might put up a fight about being asked to do other things. Some of these qualities can be very valuable, but most hiring managers don't know how to leverage these qualities. Tech people might be impressed, but hiring managers who live their lives in LinkedIn could be put off. Imagine trying to get a job as a recruiter without a LinkedIn profile. That would be impressive.
Is hiring privacy-conscious people a sign of moral decline?
I'd argue that it's a quite good idea to keep your LinkedIn profile looking exactly like that, unless you've decided that you need a good-looking profile right now for "advertising" because you're looking for a job, and you're going to use LinkedIn for that, which many job-seekers won't do.
If LinkedIn is the Amazon/Walmart/AliExpress of job adverts… which it is… it’s insane to think you cannot be the Gucci/Tiffany’s/Ferrari of job advertising and make plenty of money. Just because everyone posts shitty jobs to LinkedIn doesn’t mean that there’s a huge pool of people who want a better product experience and value it.
I ghost job offers on LinkedIn because it’s a dumpster fire. I’ve applied to jobs on StackOverflow because I know I’m cutting through the entire bullshit process. Those companies might ghost me, but the point remains that it’s insane to think there’s no value in being a job advertising platform people actually want to apply to adverts on.
Recruiters in tech are worse than useless, they don’t know anything and shovel useless candidates into a pipeline that has to develop Byzantine things like white boarding and other performative hoops to filter the junk candidates out. Between Stack Overflow and GitHub I shouldn’t need more than one interview maybe two if it’s a large company where you can’t get everyone relevant into one meeting, and the only point of that meeting should be a basic culture fit appraisal and working out that Im not a dog or three cats in a trench coat pretending to be a human.
I hate LinkedIn. It's a terrible, cluttered mess of a website. It's shady as all hell. Their mobile app is unusable.
And yet, just by having a profile that's even vaguely up to date, I get job offers left and right. Most of them are complete crap, but I was also contacted by a recruiter for one of the big four on there. I filter all the email to a separate folder where it can rot eternally, and I page through the messages on LinkedIn every few weeks to see if there's anything interesting.
I use LinkedIn as a memory dump for job history and to keep tabs on old co-workers, but I actively try to avoid it otherwise. I didn't know they had a resume builder and wouldn't have looked, but it makes sense to have one. Even knowing they have one I'd be very interested to actually build my resume outside of it, but I don't know how representative I am.
A funny fact: if you apply for a job at LinkedIn, they ask you to upload a resume instead of autofilling with data they already have. There are good reasons for this of course (e.g., public vs private info), but does provoke some WTF the first time you see it.
I imagine the candidates were sorted digitally at multiple points to narrow things down and share among those hiring. During the arduous process the weary workers take their glance away from the screen to relax for a second only to notice their company's name -- or bosses face in an odd place on the web page they now have memorized from screen burn-in and that's precisely when this ad is almost (IMO not almost) guaranteed.
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