Real relationships, not online connections, build true professional networks

Some of the top recruiters start 10-20
quality relationships per week.

I am in the IT and Healthcare IT recruiting and staffing business. I am also a self-admitted technology maven and admirer. So when I ran across a blog regarding LinkedIn's affect on the recruiting industry, I felt compelled to expand on the subject further. While Navid Sabetian says that LinkedIn's bubble will burst and briefly, in closing, that one needs to cultivate relationships with top line candidates and build them over the years; with all respect to Mr. Sabetian, I think both points are obvious.

Here is the bigger picture:

Yes, Facebook will have a billion users soon enough, which equates to a ridiculous amount of influence.  LinkedIn is probably the largest network of potential candidates and recruiters on the planet right now.  There are the 'old' job board standards (Monster, Careerbuilder, Dice, etc…), Google+, and 'who knows what else' emerging that I haven’t yet fully experienced.

 

There is no silver bullet: Meaning, there is no next or current 'big thing' that is the source to go to find the best candidates for all the open jobs out there.  This new market for talent is not about finding a single, or even two or three sources to find people.  It is about creating a network of real people, across all the relevant channels available to you.  It’s not about how many connections you have on LinkedIn or Facebook, but about how many people in your specialty areas with whom you are able to create some form of human interaction.

In fact, some of the best sourcing around is still done the old fashioned way; through direct, in-person communication. The internet has a host of tools for finding qualified candidates on paper (or on your monitor if you've gone paperless); however, it doesn't replace the legwork of striking up a conversation and getting to know them.

Sabetian claims to have a professional network with 16,000 direct connections with another 12,000 waiting in the wings, with whom he cannot interact due to a glitch on LinkedIn. It raises the question of how one would interact with the first 16,000. In one work year, assuming no vacation or holidays, you would have to interact with 61 people per day. Is it doable? Yes. Is it realistic each contact will be a good connection and suitable for an ongoing relationship? No. Some of the best recruiters make 50 to 100 contacts and start building 10-20 solid relationships a week with candidates.    

To me, as a few of the blog comments also eluded to, it seems that LinkedIn will likely become less effective as recruiters start to use connections as a database. The relevance you can have to one another on a human level in a sea of 28,000 connections seems to be very low for both sides; rendering the service less valuable to both parties. It brought to mind Malcom Gladwell's idea in The Tipping Point that we, as humans, cannot maintain more than 150 real social relationships with others at one time.

In fact, I think it is why I am of the opinion that LinkedInitself is having trouble remaining relevant to users today.

Is the idea of having a professional network with thousands of connections compelling? Certainly it is. But only if you maintain contact with your network, remain relevant its members, and interact with them on a regular basis. Otherwise it's just an overinflated database; not a true network.

Even with all the technologies and social 'networks' available, the basics of recruiting haven’t changed; or maybe they did for a while and now they have come full circle. The only difference is that now, we have more sophisticated tools to make the job of finding real people to develop real relationships with easier. 

I haven’t been in the industry long enough to know how things were done pre-Internet circa 1995, but I do know there couldn’t have been any option other than building a real contact network.  It must be much easier now to find the people to build that same network today; but people are still people and they want good jobs, with good companies where they feel valued; and they want the same when being wooed for a position.

All of the perks that many companies are starting to offer (benefits, higher than average pay, flex-time, daycare, healthcare, free lunches, etc.) to make happy workers cannot replace investment in relationships with those employees. We'll explore this idea further next week.

Good recruitment firms and recruiters become an extension of their clients' business and are often the first point of contact a candidate has with an employer; making relationship building with both even more critical.

Josh Kaplan writes on various subjects including management, information technology breakthroughs, healthcare IT recruitment and innovations, big data, IT staffing and recruitment, and technical news and trends. 

Another Dagger in the Heart of Job Boards?: BranchOut announces $25-million in additional backing for combat with LinkedIn

BranchOut's new round of funding could heat up competition with LinkedIn

For investors, it is a small price to pay: One US dollar for each of BranchOut’s current users. To CEO Rick Marini; it’s 25-million reasons to sleep better knowing his quest to take on LinkedIn just got easier.

BranchOut is a Facebook app that connects professionals through the social media platform and has grown to 25 million usersin only two years. To put this into perspective, BeKnown, Monster’s branded version of the same kind of Facebook app (minus the value to recruiters) was launched last June and has about 177,000 users. The new funding brings the company’s total backing to $49 million.

Marini’s explains his company’s success by first lauding LinkedIn as a great product but noting it’s not very personal. He describes LinkedIn as a great resource for finding 10-percent of the workforce and compares it to meeting someone at a professional event for five minutes. He goes on to suggest that Facebook users are engaged, care about one another on a more personal level and that users will go out of their way to help one another get a job.

At 150 million users, LinkedIn is atop the social recruiting and job search ladder. However, Facebook has an estimated 850 million users; another reason why investors are willing to fork over that kind of cash. Recent reports that LinkedIn’s valuation may be overstated by as much as 30-percent and a revised target of $77 per share is more realistic, may be a cause for a little concern for the juggernaut, but more likely a bump in the road.

This news brings me back once again to the subject of job board relevancy and their likely demise. And before you roll your eyes and fire off an email to ask me why I hate the job boards or tell me that the boards are relevant and robust, sit down and have a think on the following five items of interest:

1. People are talking about LinkedIn and BranchOut. Seriously, I have not seen or heard from CareerBuilder or Monster in weeks. In fact, the last mainstream media story I read that grabbed a headline was about how Monster was laying off hundreds at its Massachusetts headquarters, the story that sparked this whole debate.

2. Monster and Careerbuilder are talking about themselves. Ala Donald Trump, the companies are trying to create their own buzz. Today Monster announced an investor conference call to discuss first quarter results and a CareerBuilder press release says the company bought Brazil’s largest job board today. They also issued another press release of the results of a study they performed about how hiring managers are using social media.

3. CareerBuilder released a study about how hiring managers are using social media. Is there an echo in here? Why would a job board want to tell people that nearly two out of five hiring managers are using social media to search for information on job candidates? Although subtle, the story, the results and the survey seem steer the reader to think of the dangers of social media more than support social media use. In fairness, CareerBuilder does great research. Their informational products are robust and have very insightful, powerful data. Quite possibly, CareerBuilder’s future will be determined by how well they leverage and manage all of that data. Then again, if social and professional networks keep gobbling up their market share of resumes, where are they going to get their data?

4. Numbers don’t lie. The market cap for LinkedIn is $10.71 billion and Monster comes in at $999.83 million. CareerBuilder is harder to nail down because it is owned by several large media companies and their collective market caps are not 100-percent attributable to CareerBuilder. An industry analyst suggests a Monster-esque $1 billion for the company. While I am not a market analyst by profession (nor should my word be taken as advice), my best guess is that CB lies somewhere between $1.5 and $2 billion based on current market information. Maybe this isn’t a fair assessment given the point at which each company is in its individual life cycle, but I would say the numbers are hard to ignore and are evidence to support my point. That’s what we’re debating right: Company life cycles?

  

5. Social networks are mobile. Linkedin and BranchOut have engaging mobile apps with content that brings users to it for more than just social networking, more than just job search, and more than just information; they are true social platforms.  The job boards don’t have this kind of staying power and attention share in their mobile apps since they are currently single purpose.

Boards are losing market share while social platforms, like the early days of the boards, are growing exponentially. They too will have a lifecycle. The slightly concerning aspect of BranchOut is the fact that it runs as a Facebook app. There is growing industry sentiment that Facebook itself is becoming irrelevant and that its recent purchase of Instagram is an attempt to regain some relevancy with users.

Job boards do have a place. I use them, not mostly nor exclusively, to help find new talent and industry data. Boards are going to have to find a way to remain relevant with users and customers, and do so quickly, if they are to survive.

Is there an app for that?



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