LinkedIn kindly invited me to attend Talent Connect, their first large scale customer event hosted this week in San Francisco. Here are some of my key takeaways.
A Crowd of Innovators:
This was not just a crowd of happy customers. It was clear attendees came to learn and to help. It felt as if the crowd was unified around a common quest: to make the world of recruiting a better place.
120 Million Users and Counting:
It took LinkedIn 477 days to reach the one million user mark, but only 9 days to sign up their most recent million for a total of over 120m users today. Their growth in the professional world is simply staggering.
Holding 120 million resumes is incredible. Holding 80 million up-to-date resumes is incredibly disruptive. When I left MrTed to found SmartRecruiters I immediately updated my LinkedIn profile. So LinkedIn has my current profile while every headhunter, ATS, job board, and independent database has become outdated.
If you’re still relying on old-school databases (including your own for that matter) you are hunting in a graveyard.
“The Source”:
The question of whether LinkedIn is going to transform recruiting forever is not a matter of “if” or “when” but “how”.
LinkedIn has become and will remain “The Source”. No more resumes, no more databases. Just standardized online profiles. We have entered an era of transparency. Transparency generates trust and it triggers good behaviors. Now recruiting will have to be social again. And that is great news.
After years of hunting, fishing, and farming, recruiters (and managers) will now have to start socializing with the people they wish to hire.
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