With 60 million profiles, LinkedIn is shaking things up. A lot. The recruitment industry is certainly feeling it, but LinkedIn is more than just about finding employment, as the article ‘How LinkedIn will fire up your career‘ from Fortune suggests:
Facebook is for fun. Tweets have a short shelf life. If you’re serious about managing your career, the only social site that really matters is LinkedIn. 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.
To make the point about the recruitment industry shake up, the article focusses on Accenture’s goal of using LinkedIn to hire 40% of new recruits in the next few years. That’s 40% of at least 50 000 new recruits this year.
To put a sharper point on it: If you don’t have a profile on LinkedIn, you’re nowhere. 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.”
It’s an article that’s certainly worth a read, and if you’re not using LinkedIn, personally or for your company, you can’t help but being left with the question “why not?”.
TomorrowToday has a group on LinkedIn that’s used for discussions around the Future World of Work. One of the recent questions has centered around LinkedIn and whether people who make use of the group have been contacted via LinkedIn for opportunities.
I’ve been on LinkedIn for 2 or 3 years, and while I’ve not had any concrete employment opportunities thrown my way, it’s been a great tool to connect with people in a business context. It is a social platform that looks poised to be an industry shaker up-er-er now and into the future.