Predators snap at LinkedIn's heels
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

Abstract

Online recruiting via social media now looks for passive as well as active candidates. LinkedIn launches Talent Pipeline and Monster announces increased in bookings, but Facebook retains its popularity, with its BranchOut app passing the 25 million user mark.

Item

LinkedIn is extending a helping hand to recruiters by launching Talent Pipeline. Part of its Recruiter product, this new offering will allow recruiters to manage all their talent leads in one place, regardless of the source.

The rise of social media and other new sources of potential candidates is driving a shift toward more direct sourcing, LinkedIn explains, and recruiters are expanding their search beyond active candidates to include “passive” ones – people who aren’t actually looking for their next career move. Professional networks like LinkedIn have made it possible to recruit passive candidates at scale for the first time, it adds.

Maybe – but LinkedIn may not be quite so much of a recruitment leader as it would have us believe. Take Monster.com; only a few months ago it was in some difficulties, with a decline in both revenue and bookings and plans to shed 400 employees (LiveWire comment here). But Monster has now announced a 5% year-on-year increase in bookings, including a $23 million contract with the United Kingdom government’s Department for Work & Pensions and better than expected execution in North America.

Commenting on the results, Bloomberg’s Danielle Kucera points out that Monster is pushing its semantic search technology, which digs through contextual terms to bring up more relevant results, and keep users from defecting to companies such as LinkedIn. However previous evidence suggests that employers actually prefer Facebook to LinkedIn for investigating potential recruits (LiveWire report here) – and now some recruiters seem to be upping their game where Facebook is concerned.

Human resources staff at the Financial Times have been using social media for recruitment for some time, targeting niche online communities and establishing an active presence on social networks. Now the FT has launched a Careers App on Facebook, promoting its own vacancies and encouraging users to share them on Facebook or elsewhere – vacancies which at the time of viewing included sales, account management and feature writing jobs.

But all eyes currently seem to be on another Facebook app for the jobs market: BranchOut. Launched less than a year ago, it’s just passed the 25 million user mark (compared with LinkedIn’s 150 million incidentally) and has secured $25 million in new funding.

LinkedIn focuses on white collar jobs – only 10% of the market – BranchOut’s founder Rick Marini told Forbes magazine, whereas there’s huge scope for growth in skilled technical jobs, alerted via smartphones. Marini’s combative approach has even prompted Business Insider’s Henry Blodget to advise LinkedIn to buy BranchOut before Facebook does.

There can’t be many people who aren’t currently harbouring serious concerns about their careers. Developments such as these do at least give them more tools for a little bit of self-help.

« Blog