LinkedIn launches new CRM for passive candidates: Talent Pipeline

At LinkedIn’s Talent Connect conference in Las Vegas today LinkedIn launched LinkedIn Talent Pipeline to allow you have a central database on LinkedIn to store passive candidates that are not even on LinkedIn. It’s their version of a passive candidate CRM system. This is going to help them create a passive candidate hub for recruiters and will certainly propel the company to getting the magic 640 million professionals around the world they feel should be on LinkedIn.Some of the problems they say this solves are:

Recruiters can import leads and resumes found from other sources into Recruiter.  These records can be searched, tagged with additional information, and shared across the team just like any profile sourced on LinkedIn. With new tools for adding a lead’s source and status, recruiters will be able to report on and improve the efficiency of their pipeline activities.

Stale leads are transformed into up-to-date records with deeper insights by being connected to LinkedIn. When new leads are imported, they are connected to their LinkedIn profile, which members keep updating even when they aren’t looking for a job. Recruiters are better positioned to evaluate and build relationships with leads, based on the insights provided by the LinkedIn profile, including shared connections, activity updates, recommendations and shared groups.

Because it is LinkedIn, it is an easy extension of the sourcing that recruiting teams already do on the professional network today.  More than 75 of the Fortune 100 and another 6,000 companies use LinkedIn Hiring Solutions as a resource for finding, contacting, evaluating and staying in touch with leads, since they know most of their leads have profiles on LinkedIn.

It is only available for their chartered strategic consultants and will be more available next year to the wider public.

The product will be free for those who have Recruiter accounts!

You can learn more on the LinkedIn blog here

LinkedIn let’s companies post status updates

This is a big move by LinkedIn to compete more with Facebook Pages but also to try become a credible alternative site for company’s career pages, which the company would love to see a trending towards.

Up until last Thursday users could follow companies but now more than 2 million businesses with company pages can post status updates to followers.

Company status updates will also appear in a page follower’s LinkedIn homepage news feed. And any LinkedIn member can see, like and comment on status updates, or share an update with friends, from the company page.

Companies interested in the new feature can turn it on here.

Here are some FAQs you need to be aware of. 

Who will see my Company Status Updates?
Followers of your Company will see the Status Updates on their homepage (when they login to LinkedIn) or by going to your Company’s “Overview” tab. Each Follower’s network will also have an opportunity to see the posts- as long as the follower comments, likes, or shares.

Who can post a Company Status Update?
In order to post a Company Status Update, you must be an Administrator of your Company Page, and your Company Page must be set to “Designated Admins only”.

How can I add Administrators?
From the “Overview” tab, click on the dropdown “admin tools” and select “edit”. In “edit” mode, select “Designated users only” and type in the names of the people who should have Administrative rights. Click “Publish” to save.

How can a Company post a Status Update?
Anyone who has Administrator rights and whose Company Page is set to “Designated Admins only” will be able to post a Status Update on the “Overview” tab.

Who can comment/like a Company Status Update?
Any LinkedIn Member can comment on, like or share a Company Status Update.

Will Company Status Updates support URLs?
Yes, it will support text and URLs (website, image, YouTube video). URLs will be automatically shortened with the LinkedIn URL shortener.

Will Company Status Updates support Images?
Yes, it will support URL links that are images. The Administrator will be able to preview the image thumbnail and associate a Title and Description to it. Posts can be up to 500 characters (including spaces) and Title can be up to 250 characters (including spaces). URLs will be automatically shortened with the LinkedIn URL shortener.

Will Company Status Updates support Video?
Yes, it will support URL links that are YouTube Videos. The Company will be able to preview the status update and associate a Title and Description to it. Posts can be up to 500 characters (including spaces) and Title can be up to 250 characters (including spaces). The videos will be able to be played inline. URLs will be shortened automatically with the LinkedIn URL shortener.

How long can a Company Status Update be?
Posts can be up to 500 characters (including spaces).

Is there any tracking & reporting for Company Status Updates?
You will be able to see impressions and engagement on each Company Status Update. An impression = views of the status update. Engagement = total interactions (comments, likes, clicks, shares)/total impressions. This data appears approximately 24 hours after an update is published and will continue to update on a daily basis.

How long will Status Updates appear on the Overview tab?
At this time, the Overview tab is restricted to showing the most recent 20 posts. This will include status updates, any job opportunity, new hires etc…Once a status update becomes the 21st post, it will be removed from the feed.

How can I see a history of posts?
Presently, there is no ability to go back to old posts or the metrics related to those posts.

How can I control comments made?
Administrators have the ability to delete inappropriate comments. Simply go to the upper right corner of the comment and click on the “x”.

Is there a limit to how often a business can post?
No. However, business’ that post an excessive amount are subject to review by LinkedIn and could risk having their page deleted.

Identified – Eric Schmidt invests in social recruitment

When Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google invests in recruitment software it’s worth investigating. This week I caught a glimpse of a new company called Identified.com which I think has a real chance to do very well in the recruitment landscape. I spent a couple of hours this weekend reviewing it and I was very impressed. Check it out here.

What Identified does is offer a new professional networking play in a gender that is growing ever competitive.We are only beginning to explore the power of data analytics in recruitment and it is very very early days. In my time in LinkedIn I got the chance to work with some of the finest data scientists in the world who are working closely on a variety of algorithms, mashups and tools that will bring to reality the ability of recruiters to read a wide range of data sets to extrapolate new insights to information to make them more competitive. Identify brings us one step forward to a more complete job ubiquitous recommendation searchable skills index.  We live in a professionally networked world where the talent economy is unfolding in new and exciting ways. Professional skills graphs are a hot topic at the moment as are the current API wars taking place. What Identified tries to do is offer a professional job search engine in a clever new way. It does this by trying to offer a 0 to 100 scale for particpants using three key criteria:

• professional career
• education background and
• social network.

The index ranks top candidates on various skills by using a combination of your Facebook data and data you have put in manual. Interestingly, another professional network in Ireland, SkillPages, is actually operating in the same space trying to offer a network purely focused on the skills component of a person’s profiles. It currently is based in Blackrock and has approx 20 staff already and is growing quickly! We wish them well and hope they continue to expand quickly.  LinkedIn has also been focused on skills with their skills tags and skills pages which are growing quickly. The approach from each company is different though and that’s where it get’s very interesting, especially when you factor in the race to bring their products to new languages and cultures that haven’t been tapped into yet and can offer quick hit loyalty for first mover advantage.  This is how Identified have done it!

What I don’t like about this approach however, is if you don’t have a strong education you score low. I’m not sure that is necessarily the right approach to take but I completely understand it is hard to index potential and passion for those entrepreneurs who either didn’t go on to pursue further education or left mid way. Also, there are some other serious flaws when it comes to the focus just on your network, experience and education. Surely, there should be more factors involved when indexing an individual’s score: creativity, leadership, intellectual curiosity, etc. It’s crude but it’s a fascinating entry into the market.

To join and use the site you need to allow Identified access to your social graph on Facebook. Once that is done you get quickly ranked against your friends and you get prompted to add more detail to improve your ranking. I started with a score of 45.

One excellent feature that the site explores is the wonderful world of analtyics which I will be writing about lot more in the future.If you want a glimpse into some of the data analytic offerings that LinkedIn could offer in the future, set up a profile in Identified and you’ll get to see what type of analytics potentially can be shared about individuals and their networks. On your personal page, Identified lists the most common job titles, most common companies, most common universities. Powerful information.

Here is my search for recruiters. Unfortunately, no Irish Recruiters come up in the first page but I hope that changes soon.  Identify has been added as a topic of discussion on the certified social media course and advanced certified internet recruiter course where I will be teaching a lot of new techniques for recruiters to rank higher in their Identified ranking and how to search for new pools of talent using this new professional network.

To date, Identified has scored and indexed over 40 million professionals, 60,000 companies and over 8,000 universities. This is explosive growth and I look forward to seeing Identified spreading quickly across the US and then more into the international sphere. 40 million profiles is a lot! Google plus doesn’t even have 30 million yet. While BeKnown, BranchOut and Google + have been getting a lot of attention of late it looks like the team behind Identified have been quietly putting their robots and crawlers to work.

Twitter Analytics and some excellent social media stats

Twitter for quite some time have had a hard time getting business advertisment spend over on their site. They’ve tried a bunch of things with marginal success. At tech crunch this week it was announced that they are working on a new Twiitter Analytics tool… this is going to help those advertising budget owners to understand where to lay their chips, and when they splice the data using this new analytics tool it may just shift some advertising dollars Twitter’s way. Smart move. I’m looking forward to testing it on my Irishrecruiters handle.

Also, check out this very cool PPT on some of the latest stats on social media around the world in 2011!

1. Awareness of Facebook is close to 100%
2. More than 1 billion people (>70% of internet population) use social networks.
3. People use more than Facebook. In Europe, people join on average 1,9 social networks. In USA it’s 2,1; Brazil 3,1 and India 3,9.
4. Average Facebook session lasts 37 minutes, Twitter 23 minutes. More than 400 million people use Facebook daily.
5. There is a big Twitter paradox:80% is aware of Twitter, only 16% is using it.
6. Vkontakte is big in Eastern Europe: 55% awareness, 39% penetration.
7. Difficult for new social networks to succeed. 60% does not want any new social networks. 93% is happy with what they have and won’t in- or decrease. Big social networks will get bigger and small ones will get smaller.
8. People connect online with their offline friends. People love to connect to people.
9. >50% of social network users are connected to brands.
10. Offline brand experiences are the main online conversation starters.
11. People become a fan on Facebook because they like the product, not because of advertising.
12. 36% posted content about a brand on social networks.
13. Consumers want to be in the boardroom. 44% is asking to take part in co-creation of products & advertising.
14. Positive experiences are bigger conversation starters than negative experiences. People like positive stuff.
15. Consumers prefer e-mail over social networks to ask questions to brands.
16. 2 out of 3 employees is proud about their employer, but only 19% shares stories on social media: unused conversation potential!
17. 38% of internet users has a smart phone. They are more intensive users of social networks than people without a smartphone.
18. On average, people install 25 apps on their smartphone, but only use 12. Most used apps are social network apps.
19. 12% of smartphone owners is using location based services. 4% of smartphone users are familiar with augmented reality.
    20%of location-basedusers checks in daily

Social media around the world 2011

View more presentations from steven van belleghem

 

A busy few days

It’s been a busy few days for me with setting up my new company and transitioning away from LinkedIn. It feels great to be working for myself and I’m looking forward to a completely new set of challenges. Thanks to all of you that have sent me so many positive messages. It is much appreciated. I look forward to catching up with you all in the coming weeks to discuss some of the services I will be offering. Also, thanks to you who are also agreeing to some consultancy work. I didn’t think some job offers would come in so quickly!

I’ve also as usual being paying close attention to the recruitment industry. Here are some of the things that this week have caught my eye.

Looks like Facebook are rolling out circles soon! You either love it or hate the way they copy so many ideas from their competitors but either way it makes a lot of sense to let the market test what is working and then simply copy.

LinkedIn now allows you include voulunteer experience in your profile. You can learn more here.

Also BranchOut is rumored to be launching something called “Recruiter Connect” which will be very similar to LinkedIn’s Recruiter product. It will interface with ATSs and allow you search through millons of people on BranchOut. This Thursday at the Irish Recruiters conference we be discussing the latest from BranchOut and discussing what this may been for LinkedIn. If you want to come to the conference you can still get your tickets here.

Also big shout out to the organisers of CareerZoo this weekend for an excellent event!

Skype launches new app directory

Skype appears to have launched a new app directory in the cloud, allowing users to access all the third-party apps for both consumers and businesses built on top of Skype’s API.

Very cool! At launch, Skype has 23 apps featured as soft-launch partners, expect this to grow quickly!

Guest Blog Post – Recruiting the Candidate – Five things many employers do not do well….

Thanks to Peter Cosgrove,  Director CPL for this blog post!

For certain skill-sets there is a lack of supply of good people, here are 5 things that employers regularly fall foul of, so even when they have the candidates they often cannot find the right person. 

Job specification:  All jobs require there to be some sort of a job specification as this is what helps the prospective candidates understand the role. Many job specs are out of date, do not really highlight what the job entails and are often written by someone who is not close enough to want the job is – line managers should sign off on all their own job specifications as they truly know what they need,. A line manager needs to be fully involved in the hiring process and not leave it to the HR Department.

References – the amount of times I receive a reference check and it is a tick-box exercise where you can hear the other person who is regularly not the prospective boss asking standard questions. It amazes me that one of the best ways to find about a person is the three year interview they just did at their last company. Despite the fact that more companies are not giving references, it is critical to find out as much as you can about the person at their last job – this is information you cannot easily gauge at interview .

Lack of awareness of the company brand – interviewing a candidate is not all about your company. Guess what – just because you believe you are a great company to work for does not mean everyone else does. What will help is a strong first impression, a passionate interviewer, a company that seems to care about the person they are interviewing and one who actually interviews that candidate. Good candidates want to be interviewed and challenged, they want to feel they earned the job so give them a strong interview and a great first impression.

Wanting a replica of the person who has just left – “We want someone like Bob” is a well heard phrase. Try to think about your vacancy, what you really want is Bob from three years ago, as Bob today knows everything about the job and is leaving, so you will not get someone like him. If the person can already do the job, then they should not and most likely won’t want it.

Assessing the candidate: Interviews are poor indicators of the quality of the hire, a Belgian survey highlighted that an interview had about a 25-30% success rate whereas an assessment centre brought his up to 63%. It makes sense that if you test someone through psychometrics, see how they perform in a group, give them a task to perform in a live environment and also interview them , you are more likely to get the person you want – but only if you know how to set these assessments up fairly and appropriately,

Great people are very hard to find – don’t make it harder by not doing the basics right.

Download the new LinkedIn App

How many folk out there in Irish Recruiters have downloaded the LinkedIn app for their Iphone, blackberry, Android enabled phone or iPad. Please leave a comments if you have!

Did you know we just launched some new apps! For the first time, we’ll be providing that experience not only in our iPhone and Android applications, but also in a brand new HTML5 experience for use in any modern mobile web browser. You can get the apps here:

Get the iPhone app now | Get the Android app now

The coolest thing for me is you can now access groups with this release! This has been the number one feature request and it a real godsend! You can learn a lot more here.

Changes in the search engine world recruiters need to know

Did you know that Microsoft made an announcment last month that Bing will now power the English language queries for Baidu, China’s number one search engine. This is a big step forward for Bing and if the team at Microsoft continue to integrate social search using Facebook’s data and do a similar deal with RenRen China’s biggest social network the search engine industry in China could start to get a lot more interesting.

Also, Yahoo converted the organic results for its European properties to Bing’s search directory. Now, Yahoo US, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, UK, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, New Zealand, Peru, and Venezuela are now all powered by Bing.

What this translates into is the commands that used to work for Yahoo’s European index are now the same as the commands recognised by Bing. For those who want more detail go to  Microsoft and Yahoo!’s search alliance site: www.searchalliance.com/

If you want to learn more about search engines and how to use them properly for recruitment you should check out the Irish Recruiters in association with the CIPD’s certified internet recruiter course. 

Here’s some of the content on the course:

• What are search engines and what is Boolean searching with clear examples included
• How to flip search and x-ray servers and peel back URLs
• The important anatomy of a URL
• You’ll learn how to use field commands and wild card searches
• What is our philosophy on passive candidates and why we think they increase quality of hire
• How to tailor your search to international recruitment assignments so that you can carefully craft Boolean strings for the European and Asian markets
• How to do time machine searching, code language searching and quick competitive analysis tag sourcing

Contact me or the CIPD if you want to learn more. The next course is Tuesday the 6th of September.

On the topic of search in my up and coming presentation at the Irish Recruiters annual conference on the 15th of September I’ll be talking about how LinkedIn’s Paid Recruiter product allows my recruitment team at LinkedIn search and will be showing how the amazing “Similar Profiles” feature has helped to speed up our time to hire.

If you want to know more about LinkedIn’s Recruiter Product and a host of other LinkedIn corporate solutions go here.

Innovation at LinkedIn you don’t want to miss and the financials!

Some things catching my eye at the moment at LinkedIn.

LinkedIn now has a new profile makeover to help you enhance your professional identity, learn more about it here. It’s worth 3 or 4 minutes of your time.

Check out the company’s impressive latest financial statements here . Some of the highlights that caught my eye were:

• Members grew to 115.8 million, an increase of 61% from the second quarter of 2010
• Unique visitors of 81.8 million per month, an increase of 83% from the second quarter of 2010
• Page views of 7.1 billion, an increase of 80% from the second quarter of 2010

Also the creative energy of some of the brighest interns in America particpated in LinkedIn’s first intern hack day! This signifies the innovative culture permeating through LinkedIn. You can check out more in the video. Some of the results were amazing. My favourite being LinkedInOut! Very very cool! Also was great to see James Gosling the founder of Java being on the adjudication panel!

Did you miss “Apply with LinkedIn”! This for me is one of the very biggest innovations ever at LinkedIn. Over time a bit like PayPal’s payment button I think will become a world wide recognised internet standard. In this case the ability to apply for a job with your LinkedIn profile.

Monster launches new semantic search service in the cloud

To learn more go here.The software is in beta at the moment and will be only available to US and UK customers for the moment.

BeKnown and Google + – Are we at the end of Social 1.0

Monster have entered the professional networking world with a quasi LinkedIn Branch Out facebook app.

Here’s some interesting commentarty from John Bersin.

Check out the videos!

I wonder how many people will give it go!?! Get ready for Google’s Plus in the social world in the coming hours!?! I’m on the white list for their new Google Plus one offering and I’m looking forward to playing with it. The social netowork era is firmly upon us, just in case any of you doubted it! Who can create the glue though – who can create social 2.0! Who will provide insights to the new data curves and graphs being compiled? Will we see an Irish job board come out with a similar facebook app to create an Irish professional network of choice on the FB platform?! What about more specific skill set variants. You should come to the next Irish Recruiters Tuesday Club on the 26th of July where we will discuss all the above?

Do you know what a LinkedIn Hack Day is?

As you can imagine there is a lot of exciting innovation taking place in LinkedIn on a daily basis! There is constant improvements and new functionality being released from our  “pod” teams working on a rich variety of roadmap initiatives. A good way for you to get a glimpse into the culture and passion of the people at the company is to check out our Hack Days! This will give you an idea of some of the amazing work some of our engineers and product folk produce typically in one day!

If any of you have any cool ideas how LinkedIn can improve their products or create a “hack” for our platform, drop me a mail declan.fitzgerald@gmail.com and don’t forget to check out LinkedIn Labs which I’ll be talking more about at our next Tuesday Club in a few weeks!

Job Posting Analytics

I’ve always wanted to have a version of Google Analytics for every job post that my team is using… Imagine having detailed analytics around how effective the title you are using on your job description is and if it is attracting the right audience you want. Imagine knowing the terms that visitors are using to get to your job description and how many have applied and from what companies. These powerful analytics are now available in LinkedIn jobs. This is a huge advancement in innovation and providing insights into datasets that will power recruitment departments to more efficient job posting and much quicker results.

Check out the following job post and especially the virtual tour at the end to learn more, here.

If you click on the following image you’ll see some of the live data from a role I am helping to recruit for today.

It is innovation like this that is exciting me inside LinkedIn. Our product managers and carefully thinking about how data and insights into data sets around recruiters actions. Recruitment Analytics is a fascinating topic. What does it mean? What would a data scientist in a recruitment department do if they could track the effectiveness of all the activity that is taking place around your job descriptions in real time. How would they advise your team to edit your job descriptions to make it more appealing to your target audience. When are we going to see the first Recruitment Analytics conference? Would you go?

National Roadshow to Help Jobseekers through hard times

Just arrived back into the country after another work trip to San Fran and it’s good to be home on Irish soil. Last week was all about management meetings in LinkedIn and also planning for a new recruitment training series for all our recruiters and members of our hiring solutions and recruitment product consultancy departments.

Something I wanted to draw your attention to was a new roadshow that CPL are running designed to assist thousands of job seekers throughout Ireland. It will take place from Friday the 13th of May until Monday the 23rd of May and it will be a free of charge series of talks around the country where job seekers can learn how to prepare a great CV.

To learn more go to here

Also, I am currently searching for a world class full-time recruiter to join my European recruitment team, based out of London, here’s the spec for the role if you know of anyone interested.

Tweetdeck for Chrome

The current state of social media in Ireland

Interest use by Salesforce of video JDs to hire social media professionals

Thanks to Noel Reidy from Google for sharing this one with me.

LinkedIn Skills

This is only the start… more to come on skills and skills graphs. We now firmly live in a talent economy where professional networking is at the center of its ebbs and flows.

Check out your InMap

Some more innovation from the people at LinkedIn… create a visualisation of your own social graph. It’s called an InMap and you can check it out here.

Also some new ads from Yahoo and some bus stops in San Fran.

Any idea what is the Twitter clone in China. Sina Weibo is growing fast in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It currently has over 50 million users and is expecting to hit 100 million by the end of 2011. Gaofei Wang, Vice President of Sina Weibo shared with Mobile World Live in an Interview on its growth phase and briefly on its monetization plan.

And if that wasn’t enough for one blog post check out thesocialcv.com