I love LinkedIn. So much so that I gave them a great big cheque so that I could be one of a few hundred thousand of their closest friends who gets to play with all kinds of tools. I spend a great deal of my life networking on LinkedIn and reading up on what various people and companies are doing. I love LinkedIn.
But here’s the thing. People like you must be getting extremely annoyed with people like me contacting you with the best possible career opportunities. And let’s face it, mine are absolutely the best. Better than Joe Shmoe Recruiting and every other agency between here and Mumbai. No, really.
LinkedIn is a phenomenal networking tool and even with its templates it demands a level of human involvement that in my view makes that initial contact more informed. With that said, how many emails from strangers with the second best jobs (remember, I’ve got all the best jobs) can you tolerate before you just relegate LinkedIn to an occasional check in?
And then once it gets relegated the inbox gets even more full with InMails from people like me, the people with all the second best jobs.
Of course it’s the natural evolution of the site and the good news for you, Mr I’m Not Looking for a Job, is that you can change your preferences, but you won’t will you? It’s easier to just not look too often and get the occasional ego boost to see who has been trying to reach you with that second best job.
Of course the nature of social media is to build a relationship and many recruiters want to do that but not so much to offer anything except a job and if you’re not looking for a job I ain’t got nothing for you then. We seem to be heading towards recruiters being the great unwashed of the LinkedIn world.
What will be interesting to see is what LinkedIn does to keep recruiters happy with continued access while keeping the general population happy by not allowing recruiters to be overly invasive. The trouble is, LinkedIn needs us. We spend an awful lot of money on LinkedIn so that we can continue to send you InMails about the second best jobs.
The worst thing for LinkedIn could be mass apathy as people stop tuning in.
How many people contribute towards Groups? How many people create rather than share content? How much of that content is drivel anyway? (Present Pullitzer Prize potential for Alliteration excluded) Headlines such as “Why working for an auto manufacturer is like being a blue bin” don’t exactly inspire. The reality is that most of us are far too busy to build those networks in a meaningful way other than to hit “Connect”.
It’s a fairly small step to stop hitting that connect button and to put the LinkedIn favourite in the same folder as all of those websites that demand a very occasional check in because they have nothing of much new interest going on.
It may be a matter of evolve or die. I’m thinking we’ll know in around 2 years.
In the meanwhile, remember, if I contact you, it’s because I have the BEST job ever in the BEST possible company ever working for the world’s GREATEST manager at the top end of the salary band.
