Unlock Matches on #LinkedIn

booleanstrings Uncategorized 6 Comments

Posting a paid job on LinkedIn could be well worth the money spent. A good reason for that is the job’s visibility, and not just on LinkedIn. Post a job, and Google picks it up in a matter of seconds. Set up a Google alert and you will see that. Jobs are also listed on your company page, making it more complete.

However, my current recommendation is to skip the extra pay for the “Unlock Matches”, where LinkedIn promises to automatically find candidates for you. As attractive as it may sound, the technology is just not there yet. I could write an article explaining why I think so, but I’d say our experience is what proves it best. (Of course, I might be wrong. If you are a recruiter with a positive experience finding candidates by auto-matching by any system – as opposed to a vendor of semantic search systems for candidates, – could you please leave a comment? I’d be very interested to hear from you.)

I suggest though that you take a closer look at the profiles LinkedIn picks when you post a job. Mouse over a profile and you will see plenty of info to locate the candidate yourself.

(By the way, if you do post a job for your company, I suggest asking a colleague who is new to LinkedIn.)

What has your experience been?

Comments 6

  1. Yes I would agree – seems that lists that are generated from a post “search” are off target most of the time and are not complete. Of course it depends on the post wording too – most are so badly written. But it would be nice to for a window to pop up and ask for additional keywords before the results are given.

  2. This is very much similar to what Naukri.com (India’s no.1 job board) does. After posting a job – it picks up job title and keywords (from job posting form) and run a query in their database.

    I definitely think it is a good starter if not full-proof searching method.

  3. I would agree as well. Simply put – the matching function is not nearly as strong an algorithm as it needs to be to be worth the extra money. It appears to return only the most obvious keyword matches (I’ve only posted one “paid” ad – they were running promos end of 2010 where you could post a free job ad), and miss less obvious results that a skilled sourcer would have found in the same search.

    I would add to it that the flip side, those “Jobs You Might Be Interested In” that LinkedIn provides to users, is similarly weak. It also fails to limit suggestions based on geography (I’m regularly served up lists of positions which would require a cross-country move). This can be problematic for job posters as well as job seekers.

  4. My experience has been so-so with posting on LinkedIn, though I have noticed more activity from postings I have made in the last two months than ones I made late last year. So, I agree that it is worth exploring. Here’s an anecdote that really opened my eyes. I had a free posting last year and, coincidentally, I was looking for an Objective-C developer for Kansas City (not many of those here), so I figured I would use the posting and see what happened. Anyway, someone responded and was an outstanding resource. The resource was actively looking for a job, yet he was not on the big job boards. I asked him why he was not and why he responded to my ad on LI and he told me he dislikes intensely receiving a flood of calls from recruiters who can’t wait to tell him about an “urgent position!” He also said that he considered LI to be more professional, which I found intriguing. If recruiters do not end up ruining LI, it could be a great place for sourcing for years to come.

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