I’ve not seen much blog coverage to date about LinkedIn’s Jobs Insider browser plug-in but I’m beginning to think that it could be a very important step in the evolution of our industry. For those of you who don’t yet have it, it works like this:-
1) You download the software as an extension / plug-in for Firefox or IE
2) It sits there and does nothing until you’re looking at a job posting on one of the job boards it works with
3) It pops up and tells you who in your LinkedIn connections works for that company, how many people in your extended network work there and also who in the LinkedIn groups you belong to works there
4) You tap them up for information or to even help you get the job
Personally I think it works particularly while when you’re following links from jobs by email alerts thus giving you a simple and somewhat passive approach to job seeking and networking
LinkedIn Jobs Insider has been around for a while and only works across a limited number of mainly American job boards (it does work on the UK versions of Monster and Careerbuilder), however with LinkedIn now growing by one user every second it’s really starting to come into it’s own.
The real point here is that the future for online recruitment industry is going to be via open APIs and giving power to the user to create their own tools to find jobs in the way they want to.
Imagine how powerful it would be for a user to aggregated all availible relevant jobs from anywhere on the Internet and then cross reference them with their personal network and the networks of their friends and close contacts (regardless of where info about those networks is stored)
Well the content is there and the basis of the technology is there. That basically means it’s only a matter of time.
March 4th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
The Linkedin tool sounds brilliant, and it brings the Internet a step closer to a truly relational database. There are many rivers to cross before that happens though.
March 5th, 2009 at 12:18 am
I have been thinking along the same lines…its only a matter of time before we have the conditions for a perfect market…where individuals have visibility over all vacancies and suppliers have visibility over all matching candidates….very ‘big brother’, but then what happens to the ‘agents’ in the middle?
March 5th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Personally I found so irritating I had to contact Linked In to help me remove it. It basically took over every job search page on Monster without me actually clicking on a specific job (whilst mooching about for clients in a general way). At no point did it provide me with any leads or suggestions that I had Linked In contacts who could help me. Nice idea but the only mode seems to be on or off. Some element of user control woudl be good.
March 5th, 2009 at 10:52 am
@Stephen – True but I think the current economic environment may well see those rivers crossed very quickly
@Andy – A good point to which “but there have always been agents in the middle so there always will be” isn’t necessary a valid answer
@Charlotee – I’m using it in Firefox on a Mac and managed to turn it off quite easily
March 31st, 2009 at 8:32 am
Linkedin is forming a larger part of the recruitment cycle but it is only an illustration of what will happen where all databases will be available to one another via API’s and working in one will seemlessly link to another (if you have paid for it) and provide a 360 view of the client, the candidate or the contactt. Look at what innovantage have done with Market locator, job boards and linked in. Its all going in a very exciting way, all aboard as the world has changed.