We talk people analytics with the TA leader breaking down big data at Hiring Success 19, February 26-27 in San Francisco.

Chris Louie, Senior Director of Talent Acquisition for LinkedIn, didn’t start out in TA. Four years ago this recruiting leader was a product marketer rising through the ranks of Nielsen, the NY-based global performance management company. So, when Chris announced his move to the company’s people function, everyone had the same reaction.. ‘But, why!?’

Where Chris saw an opportunity for innovation and an unscripted future, the rest of the world saw a department with a reputation for being the most corporate of all the corporate functions, ie a dusty snoozefest. As one recruiter so delicately put it “The pros are that you would be part of a new generation of HR leaders; the cons are that HR is still dramatically underpaid and disrespected as a function!”

Yet, none of this well-meaning guff deterred Chris. He saw how critical talent was to business success, and he thought, “If I can effect change in TA, it will really make a huge difference to the organization as a whole.”

Chris didn’t know it at the time, but he was actually part of a larger trend of outsiders entering this once insulated field. And, as it often does, his outside experience informed his new work in positive and unexpected ways. Chris began approaching the challenges of HR with the mind of a product marketer, leveraging his penchant for analytics, and working backwards from the desired end point to find solutions.

After three years as Nielsen’s Talent Acquisition and People Analytics, Chris began a new chapter at LinkedIn, taking with him his love of experimentation. Ahead of his session ‘Impact of Analytics in Recruiting’ at Hiring Success 19 – Americas, February 26-27 in San Francisco, we catch up with this industry changemaker to hear what it’s like to be at recruiting’s premier brand, and why HR needs its own Hippocratic Oath.

What have your first couple months at LinkedIn been like?

I’m part of the talent acquisition team here at LinkedIn. I’m not going to lie, it’s a pretty awesome team…and you would hope so given the brand reputation, right?

At LinkedIn, I am leading the teams that support all of our recruiters, helping them be their best for our hiring managers and candidates. This includes inclusion recruiting, talent attraction, candidate programs, platforms and assessments, project management, and feedback to the LinkedIn product team – so they can make our solutions better both for LinkedIn TA and the broader industry.

You once wrote that TA systems need product managers, not administrators – could you explain this idea?

Software companies don’t just develop a product for clients and walk away. They market the system, support their customers, and think about user experience – honing and evolving solutions over time. However, there’s a tendency to not view internal systems as ‘real products’ and instead just roll them out to employees with no marketing or customer success. That’s why when you look at the NPS of internal systems it’s typically quite low.

My thought is, that we need to bring the same marketing, support, and tracking efforts to these internal systems as we would to the products we deliver to our customers. Internal systems are ‘real products’, and they are critical to business success.

Tell us more about your session at Hiring Success 19 – Americas, what will practitioners walk away with?

The approach I take to people analytics is basically the scientific method. What is the problem statement or challenge that we’re trying to solve? The answer to that question dictates what you should do from an analytic perspective. Start with what you’re trying to accomplish instead of ‘what analysis can I run?’

I really love marrying analytics and talent acquisition, because you can use insights to make decisions and improve processes that payoff immediately. At the end of the day we’re not running analytics to write papers or sit on panels. This is about boosting the experience for everyone – candidates, hiring managers, and recruiters.

All that said, people analytics is still fairly underdeveloped, and only recently have we attained ready access to the data we need. The catalyst has been the digitization of our workflows and the adoption of HR tech that puts capturing data and enabling analytics at their core. But there’s still a ton more we can do.

People tend to be intimidated by the idea of creating an analytics program, do you have to be a math whiz to make sense of your data?

Anybody who’s intimidated by the math of it at all should know it’s really not about the math. We can hire statisticians or programmers to do that. What’s hard is finding people who understand the way HR and TA work today and can identify the real problems and challenges, as well as the root causes.

Could you describe your personal brand in three words?

I guess I would go with connect, care, and create.

Connect: Competing initiatives often pop up in complex organizations and ideas get lost in the shuffle. I strive to be close enough to what’s happening on the ground but also understand enough of the broader narrative to help bring things together – projects, people – so we can accomplish things instead of working at cross-purposes inadvertently. I really enjoy making connections, so that everyone gets to contribute instead of feeling their time has been wasted.

Care: At a really fundamental level, I think the ultimate job of a leader is to help his or her team succeed. And so, when you spend time with anyone on your team, you should spend more time trying to be interested than interesting. I love problem-solving, and anytime I meet with someone on my team, I try to understand what challenges they’re facing and ask how I can help. I’ve been able to progress in my career because people have shown they’ve cared about me. I hope I’m able to pay that back by doing the same for others.

Create: I’m always at my best when I’m trying to create something new or take on a challenge that’s stymied others. If you have the perfect system in place and just need someone to maintain it, then I’m probably the wrong person for the job. I’m continually looking for a fundamentally better way to do things instead of just going through the motions, which is probably one reason why I’ve made relatively dramatic career moves across multiple functions, instead of just progressing linearly in one.

In the wake of the #metoo movement, you suggest HR leaders create their own Hippocratic Oath. Tell us what yours would be.

I believe HR should adopt the ‘do no harm’ credo when it comes to the employees they support. While the impression some have is that HR is naturally “the people’s function,” the reality is that practically (given relatively large ratios of employees to HR people) it’s much more aligned with leaders. I think as an industry, we should consider whether HR should have an official responsibility of employee advocacy, which could call for creating a structure where it can have some independence from the leadership – like reporting to the Board. It might be a radical idea, but I think it still merits a discussion.

On a personal level, I guess, my Hippocratic Oath be as an advocate for my team and the candidates.

It’s important to not fall into the trap, as a manager, of viewing your team member’s work in an overly transactional way. That means continually seeing how the people working for you are growing, knowing what their professional goals are, and helping set them up for a positive trajectory. That “care” thing again.

I name candidates as well because they are often the voiceless in the recruiting process. If someone is having a negative candidate experience, they can feel alone and really have no recourse. There’s the one-in-a-hundred candidate who will get an email through to the CEO or CHRO and elicit some action, but that’s pretty rare. Given the numbers, candidates can sometimes get lost in the shuffle unfortunately. You really need to pay attention to this and safeguard the candidate experience and our sense of responsibility to them. At LinkedIn, candidate engagement and experience is extremely important to us, and it’s one of the KPIs we measure to gauge our success.

From employee highlights to engaging content, your LinkedIn page should be working overtime to attract the best employees.

While most businesses understand the power of social media from a branding and marketing perspective, many of their LinkedIn pages end up as little more than a glorified “About Us.”

LinkedIn may not be as colorful as Instagram, or as ubiquitous as Facebook, but it is a dynamic platform with plenty of options for building media-rich and informative pages that make an impact on visitors’ views of your company.

If your goal is to attract top-level talent, impress potential customers, and drive conversations important to your business—a compelling LinkedIn company page is a must-have. The question is, how do businesses create better LinkedIn pages?

Here are seven ways to improve your company’s Linkedin presence:

1. Cover the page basics

Before you go too far, make sure your page has all the basic information in place to make it a valuable marketing channel for your company. That means including the:

• Company name and URL
• External website link
• Company details including industry, company size, company type
• Logo (300×300 pixels is recommended) and tagline
• Company description (250-2,000 characters), utilizing industry keywords.

A LinkedIn page without this information will feel incomplete—and according to HootSuite, completed Company Pages receive twice the number of visitors of those with incomplete pages. These pages are better optimized for search as well.

2. Populate your updates with branded imagery

You’ve spent time and money creating a visual brand for your business—show it off. Consistent use of your logo and colors within your updates gives your page a professional look and helps you stand out among the 30 million other pages on LinkedIn.

3. Use Showcase pages to highlight recent work

Whatever new projects, products, or campaigns your business is working on, use Showcase Pages to provide them their own voice. This not only gives your LinkedIn a larger digital footprint, but it ensures that each initiative has a dedicated page that you can use to target specific audiences—particularly helpful when recruiting talent for a particular role or team.

You can promote and optimize these pages with keywords, just as you do with your main page.

4. Use Career pages to appeal to great talent

LinkedIn as a whole can be used for a number of purposes—but Career Pages are now specifically where businesses can promote their company culture and newly opened roles. Use Career Pages to share the story of your company through videos, photos, and employee-created content. Pages like these will help potential hires understand who your business has already hired, and why.

5. Decide on a branding strategy for your page

If the content for your LinkedIn is all over the place and you can’t seem to get consistent engagement, first settle on a branding strategy. The strategy for establishing thought leadership—sharing perspectives on industry news and trends, product how-to’s, articles that reflect your mission—is different than the strategy for lead generation—sharing upper funnel and lower funnel content like tip sheets and case studies.

You can always change your strategy over time as your objectives shift, but don’t try to do everything at once.  

6. Write short and “spicy” updates

LinkedIn recommends you keep your updates “short, sweet, and spicy.” That means text that is 150 characters or less, with an eye-catching point of view or statistic, with relevant hashtags.

Other aspects of a quality update include: using a call-to-action, adding a quality image (in the range of 1200×627 pixels) that is branded and matches the messaging, with a vanity URL that you can use to track traffic.

Speaking of URLs: Links are important, and posts with links get 45% higher engagement than those without. That said, the occasional post without a link—meant to simply pass along a message, not send readers to your website or other landing page—can also have a big impact.   

7. Follow best practices for content engagement

It can be difficult to garner engagement for your posts—and engagement is how to expand your network to reach influencers, thought leaders, and talent. Best practices for increasing engagement on LinkedIn include:

• Share effective, oft-shared content such as eBooks, SlideShares, infographics, case studies, how-to content, vivid visuals, and themed posts.
• Create targeted updates. You can alter your target audience by variables like geography, job function, seniority level, and more—and then post content that appeals to this narrower scope.
• Create your own, non-stock images, with stats and text embedded directly in them.
• Use free visual tools like Haiku Deck (creates excellent presentations for web sharing) and Piktochart (builds beautiful charts, graphs, banners, and other visual content).

An enticing LinkedIn page will make tapping into other people’s networks and finding great talent easy. Start thinking of your LinkedIn as an extension of your company brand, and you’ll no doubt find other ways to impress your peers, competitors, and future employees.

Build a robust talent pipeline for these competitive reqs with takeaways from LinkedIn’s 2018 report.

Every professional should enter 2019 with a comprehensive knowledge of their industry landscape. For recruiters, this means understanding the labor trends that will affect their talent pipeline.

Though a technical skills gap is evident, with the demand for check jobs increasing 14x from 2012 to 2016. What the recruiting industry has seen is no simple trend of everyone exclusively needing digital skills. In fact, the biggest skills gap lies in oral communication — ahead of social media, design, and web development — according to LinkedIn’s 2018 U.S. Emerging Jobs Report.

Skill sets, specialized by industry, are no longer prominent; rather, businesses seek to round out their team’s capabilities with a mix of hard and soft skills. For example, two-thirds of the most recruited jobs in tech are sales-based, while the same number of most recruited jobs in non-profit organizations are tech-based.

To better understand the nuances of the ever-evolving talent economy, and prepare recruiters for 2019, we bring you the highlights of The 33 Most Recruited Roles of 2018. Learn which roles are most competitive, and the specific methods for beating out the competition for top talent.

Take a look at the most recruited jobs overall.

1) DevOps Engineer

DevOps Engineer is the most recruited position of 2018. When sourcing candidates, it’s good to keep in mind that this newly popular role is a blanket term for a wide range of responsibilities that may vary between companies. LinkedIn suggests searching “adjacent terms” like “Site Reliability Engineer”.

2) Enterprise Account Executive

Also, know as AEs, these are the folks who will ensure your top customers are happy. Hot cities for these candidates include San Francisco, New York, and Boston. Recruiters should also check out Austin, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C., where — according to the LinkedIn Talent Insights — supply is high and demand is much lower.

3) Front-End Engineer

The demand for top coders who can make a company’s website interactive and visually appealing reflects the overall shift from brick-and-mortar to virtual storefronts. What business doesn’t have an online presence in this day and age?

LinkedIn advises recruiters to look towards Beijing for applicants, a city with a similar supply of qualified candidates as San Francisco, but far less demand.

Now let’s view the most recruited roles by industry…

Technology

• Enterprise Account Executive
• DevOps Engineer
• Sales Development Rep

Note two of three “tech” jobs are actual sales roles, proving soft skills are still relevant.

Finance

• Data Scientist
• Senior Software Engineer
• Senior Tax Associate

Work-life balance is the primary concern for data scientists. Recruiters who highlight this as a tenant of their company culture are more likely to snag the top candidates.

Retail

• Software Engineer
• Senior Financial Analyst
• Senior Brand Manager

Software engineer is not only the most recruited role for retail, it’s now the third most common role in the industry (up five positions since 2013).

Professional Services

• Senior Software Engineer
• Data Scientist
• Front-End Developer

Many data scientists come from a research background, so consider searching for related terms to source candidates who could transition to data scientist roles.

Education/government/nonprofits

• Software Engineer
• Business Analyst
• System Administrator

System administrators prioritize work-life balance, salary, and security in their job search, so be sure recruiters and hiring managers highlight these benefits when talking to candidates.

…And across functions.

Engineering

• DevOps Engineer
• Front-End Engineer
• Cloud Architect

Software engineers as a whole apply to jobs at a rate 13 percent lower than the general population, proactively recruiting these candidates is the most effective strategy to hire them before you need them—or a competitor does.

Sales

• Enterprise Account Executive
• Sales Development Representative
• Senior Sales Engineer

Company culture and mission are matter most to AEs, so emphasize the company’s story and work-dynamic when talking to these candidates.

Operations

• Senior Quantity Surveyor
• Delivery Manager
• Supply Director

The Bengaluru and Chennai areas of India, as well as London, tend to have the highest supply of delivery managers — be sure to scour these locations for qualified applicants.

Marketing

• Digital Marketing Manager
• Product Marketing Manager
• Senior Brand Manager

Product marketing managers are in high demand in San Francisco’s tech economy. However, supply is also high in Paris, Shangai, and Singapore, so consider extending your sourcing and recruiting efforts in these untapped geographies as well.

HR

• Technical Recruiter
• Recruiting Coordinator
• HR Business Partner

Sourcing technical recruiters straight out of university has become popular, and there’s a wide range of majors that can be relevant. LinkedIn found that technical recruiters come from a number of disciplines, including HR management, business administration, computer science, marketing, and psychology.

The top 3 recruiting strategy pointers.

1)

Source nontraditional candidates.

Consider partnering with coding boot camps, technical colleges, and vocational schools to fill those open reqs.

Companies should also consider expanding their workforce to include non-traditional options like remote workers or freelancers. Remote workers widen your talent pool and are proven to be just as productive as their in-office counterparts. Freelancers are valuable for project-based work and typically cost less than a full-time employee. It’s predicted that by 2027 50 percent of all workers in the U.S. will be freelnace, so building a network of contractors now could set a company up for future success

2)

Assess skills, not pedigree.

Make sure the skills called out in your job advertisement are relevant. Stick to essentials and avoid cliches. If your job description has 40 skills and includes the phrase ‘fast-paced environment’, start again.

Once the requisite job skills are defined, decide how to evaluate. The market for tech-based assessment is booming, and businesses that incorporate tech-based assessment tools into their hiring process tend to reduce bias.

3)

Upskill existing employees.

Upskilling employees, rather than relying exclusively on outside hires, is an increasingly popular solution to the talent shortage facing many employers today. Investing in learning and development (L&D) programs keep a company’s employees relevant while boosting employer brand. In fact, “career growth” is one of the top three reasons candidates accept an offer.

Telecommunications giant AT&T recently invested $1 billion into reskilling their 250,000 employees with great success – the workers who participate in the program are now twice as likely to get a new role within the company, and 4 times more likely to receive a promotion.

Their program includes an online portal that showcases all 3,000 roles at the company, complete with growth projection, salary expectations, skill requirements, a library of relevant classes and training demos, and contacts within the company to learn more. AT&T creates many of their courses in-house, but also partners with educational platforms and institutions to provide additional educational resources for employees.

Advice from AT&T regarding L&D programs is threefold: frame upskilling as a practical expenditure that will save time and money in the long run, transparency is key, and constantly get feedback.

Closing thoughts.

The key to acquiring top talent is playing the long game and looking to the future. Snap solutions can hold a business over while implementing the following programs, but they aren’t permanent fixes.

In today’s candidate-driven market recruiters all too often experience the pressure to make great hires without adequate support and resources. Thankfully, there are ways that recruiters can lighten the load. TA teams who learn to automate effectively, make the most of their data, and double down on employer brand will find themselves in the best position to attract quality talent to drive business.

Challenges are also opportunities, according to LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue, who reminds us that, “Whenever companies are faced with that changing pressure, they look for solutions. That’s a great driving force,” he says, “it’s the energy behind HR innovation.”

Read the full report here!

The social network, now under the wing of Microsoft, continues to acquire startups, and expand its offering.

Why build it if you can buy it? Founded in 2002 LinkedIn, the world’s largest business networking site has acquired a total of 21 companies in its assent to eminence. A number which includes three acquisitions since becoming a subsidiary of Microsoft in June of 2016; with the latest prize, Glint – an employee management platform – announced on Monday.

With almost 600 million users to date, LinkedIn has made no secret of wanting to expand their reach into phases of the employee lifecycle beyond hiring, and Glint is one more acquisition, in a long line of acquisitions, that will help them do just that. CRM and employee education are two examples of areas where LinkedIn is hoping to engage companies and boost profits, and now, with Glint, employee engagement is likely to be the third.

Since its launch in 2013, Glint has raised $80 million in the past two years and, in the latest valuation, was estimated to be worth $220 million. Microsoft, however, was willing to shell out almost twice that amount purchasing the startup for $400 million reports CNBC.

Glint’s mission is to help organizations, and managers, turn employee feedback into actionable results through surveys and data collection. Basically, it helps employers understand if their workers are happy, and in the current economy where tech talent is scarce and flighty, that’s actually vital information to know.

LinkedIn itself was a former Glint customer, naming the platform as a “top startup” for the last two years. The VP of talent solution, careers, and learning for LinkedIn, Daniel Shapero, says of the merger, “I’m so excited for the potential of what we can do together. We believe that Glint has uncovered a modern HR best practice that every company should do: Regularly gather employee feedback on work, culture, and leadership, and give leaders the tools they need to translate those insights into action.”

Glint will continue to operate as a salient entity under the leadership of the current CEO and founder, Jim Barnet, and no disruption in service to current customers is expected during the integration, which is estimated to take between 12-18 months.

On the heels of the Glint news, LinkedIn also announced that it will double down on what it’s known for – recruiting! With a total rebuild of it’s recruiting suite which will include “Talent H” an ATS for small-to-medium-size businesses as well as sourcing tools with diversity insights. A strong message to rising competitors like ZipRecruiter and Facebook that LinkedIn isn’t afraid to innovate, and a 130 percent spike in profits reported at the end of its fiscal year in June means they have the money to do it too.

“We’re not operating under the same rules as before,” John Jersin, LinkedIn’s VP of Talent Solutions admitted in a recent interview. “Candidates can be found online, and the process is more agile [than it used to be]. So we are evolving our product roadmap to [match] the talent ecosystem.”

Image via LinkedIn.

For companies like LinkedIn, the relationship between candidate and customer is a delicate balance, hinged on employer branding and hiring experience.

In an ideal scenario, every employee at your organization is an avid user of your company’s product, and all teams—from sales to development—have a personal investment in its success. Few organizations can make such a claim, but working for a company as ubiquitous as LinkedIn means high probability your employees double as users. The same can be said of the thousands of candidates who apply to work for the networking platform, particularly at the collegiate level, which falls under the jurisdiction of Emily Campana, Director of Global Campus Recruiting.

Since joining in 2011, Emily has worked her way up the LinkedIn ladder, from senior recruiter to her directorial role, and gleaned an intimate look at the company’s brand, values, and social purpose along the way. To learn more about navigating the tricky balance between candidates and customers, we invited Emily to speak at our Hiring Success conference in San Francisco.

“We have a strong consumer brand because we have so many members on the platform,” says Campana. By LinkedIn’s recent count, over 575 million—nearly 55 million of whom are college students. “But, we’ve never sat down with marketing and asked ‘what’s our EVP’, or ‘how are we going to build content for that?’ What’s happened has been pretty organic.”

The rest, Campana says, is driven by LinkedIn recruiters. “We teach our recruiters the full story of how LinkedIn came to pass, the company’s values, what we are working on, how we believe we are changing the world, and then really dive into culture and values—we call it master storyteller.” LinkedIn then asks its recruiters to promote the company brand in conversations with candidates, in a way that goes beyond job descriptions.

“Our recruiters spend time with candidates to understand what their motivators are,” says Campana. “Then, we speak to those through our culture, values, organization, and design. This way our recruiters drive the overall brand with our candidates.”

And this step is important for a company whose product is widely recognized, but whose employer brand is not advertised so much. “Our candidates believe that they know a lot about our company because they are users,” explains Campana. “We have to help them understand the consumer side of our business, and we get a lot of suggestions as a result.” And while LinkedIn welcomes critique from users, customers’ understanding of the business is often one-sided.

“Many people believe that we are just a TA product,” says Campana, “but we also have a sales product, a learning product, a marketing product, as well as our broader mission about what LinkedIn does to help empower and make professionals more successful.”

For students preparing to enter the workforce, LinkedIn hosts career-focused events at campuses across the country, where participants can receive help with their profiles, take headshots, and, according to Tey Scott, former Senior Director of Global Talent Acquisition at LinkedIn, “help them land their dream job regardless of our recruiting efforts.”

These day-long development events are held in target cities like Atlanta, Boston, and San Francisco—regions with concentrated clusters of universities. By moving away from recruiting at university career fairs—a tactic that only reached about 40 universities per year—LinkedIn adopted a more scalable method that allowed the company to expand its reach to 300+ institutions.

While campus recruiting is just one facet of LinkedIn’s talent strategy, students—primarily Millennials and Gen Zers—are an important demographic for the professional network. And LinkedIn is not alone in targeting the future workforce, with an increasing number of organizations looking at how the next generation’s values and principles directly affect how companies view candidate experience, EVP, and employer branding.

Candidates can share their good or bad experiences across their social media networks, which will likely color their perceptions—as well as those in their network—as customers for LinkedIn’s products and services.

“One of the biggest pieces of our culture and values is ‘members first’,” says Campana. “And since every candidate who comes through our door is a member that’s even more important to us—their experience is not just as a candidates, but also as a LinkedIn member.”

LinkedIn’s march across Europe has hit a bulwark in local-focus career-site, Xing. Whether the Hamburg firm can hold its ground is a notion the American juggernaut is keen to challenge.

“Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”

In 2015, the infamous auto-greeting took the hallowed mantle of being bland enough to caption nearly every New Yorker cartoon, ever. (The third phrase to hold the distinction, actually). Twitter piled on, appropriately and as expected.

@frank_chimero pic.twitter.com/brbcUjSpyY

— (@williamPriceIII) September 22, 2015

Then, in 2016, LinkedIn was acquired, by Bill Gates’ brain trust at Microsoft.

In fratty, frenemy-laden Silicon Valley, Microsoft hadn’t so much lost its swagger, but in the age of the App – or the age of Apple – failed to amass any such virtue. LinkedIn’s image wouldn’t be getting any rub-off cred. But when fresh CEO, Satya Nadella, bought LinkedIn for a ballsy, some said misguided, $26 billion, all report cards since have been passes, and “Microsoft hasn’t intervened that much, considering the vast scope and price tag of this integration,” said eMarketer analyst Jillian Ryan. Far from curling up in a Mountain View garage, the site has since thrived, becoming the largest online business network in the world.

One anecdotal cause for LinkedIn’s uptick was scandal-ridden Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, pulling back on actual news in the FB newsfeed. For LinkedIn boss Jeff Weiner’s platform, a feed more business-focused and cat-video-free was an easy vacuum fill for an arguably more serious user base.

But LinkedIn’s news feed is the only notable upgrade to an interface. Microsoft’s true intentions in buying up and then being all hands-off were not to give LinkedIn a new UX. Your LinkedIn profile is your ever-searchable CV, and with 546 million global users in over 200 countries and counting, that’s some seriously valuable data. This is not a run-down fixer-upper, this is a massive data mine. Although with all eyes watching personal-data flow thanks to Cambridge Analytica and GDPR, better to play it like Jimmy Conway after the Lufthansa heist in GoodFellas. “Didn’t I tell you not to buy anything big, not to draw attention to yourself?”

(Pic Credit: Forward Press)

Aside from nefarious motives to remain outwardly shabby, LinkedIn’s always functioned as a backdoor recruiting and referral portal, both for passive candidates or unsatisfied employees. Now, with paid premium features for jobseekers, and new integration into Microsoft products like Office 365 and Word, it’s a far more effective one, bringing in almost $1B in revenue for Microsoft in their last reported quarter. Staffing and Recruiting is Number One on the platform’s top-five most-connected industries list, and Human Resources is the most-connected job function.

And those stats are increasingly global: India now has the second-largest number of users after the US, doors have opened at EMEA HQ in Dublin, and Amsterdam has become the platform’s second-most connected city, the Netherlands the second-most connected country. Rolling into Holland’s much larger, more linguistically immovable neighbor, however, is another matter. In Western Europe’s unflappable, industrious heartland of Germany, LinkedIn has a kaiser to unseat.

Also founded in 2003, Hamburg’s Xing remains the number-one business-based social network in Europe’s German speaking countries (Germany, Switzerland, and Austria: “DACH” in Germacronym), with 14.3M users, 994,000 subscribers, and €187.8M ($220.1M) in annual revenues.

Felix Altmann, Xing’s Senior Manager of Corporate Communications, lays it out: “We are not only the biggest, but also the fastest growing professional network in the region. In 2017 we grew by two million members. Of course there is competition, but our market position is very good.”

Xing remains the market leader in Germany, but LinkedIn, with 11M members in the DACH region, has already pulled ahead in Austria, and doubles Xing’s reach in Switzerland.

“LinkedIn has been growing by approximately a million members every six months since February 2015,” says Christian Byza, Senior Product Manager for LinkedIn Germany, “and we continue to grow, with more than two new registrations per second.”

Byza sees the company’s 11M users as a strong step towards a potential 25M, and opening a second German office in Berlin – after the first in Munich – for 15 to 20 employees later this year, he says, “shows the high importance of the DACH region for LinkedIn.”

Almost all 30 blue-chip German companies on the DAX exchange, as well as leading medium-sized companies such as Carl Zeiss, Hager Group and Sixt now use LinkedIn solutions for recruitment, marketing and sales, and yet, at least in public, Xing remains nonplussed. Xing knows their German-speaking base, and they know it intimately. LinkedIn’s global approach doesn’t matter to a firm looking to hire a bunch of secretaries in Bremen, the thinking goes. A successful car-parts manufacturer in Stuttgart would have no use for a French or English speaker, let alone need to hire outside of DACH. 

Marius Luther, founder and managing director of German job-matching app, Heyjobs, is unconcerned. “The majority of the German workforce is German-speaking only, without international contacts. For them, there is zero reason to use LinkedIn.”

But compare the two companies’ strategies in one area, and you can start to see where ground may start to shift. It’s not about UI, UX, or even language. It’s all about that backend: the Applicant Tracking System.

Last year, Xing shelled out €17M for Prescreen, a cloud-based ATS that will support the hiring process from job ads to candidate placements. “Xing is already a leading provider when it comes to modern e-recruiting,” says Xing CEO Thomas Vollmoeller. “Our acquisition of Prescreen will enable us to further consolidate this position.” As Altmann confirms, “Prescreen has been in the enterprise market before being acquired, and we have further plans to grow in that field.”

Sounds like one good ATS partner to have, alright. Though “LinkedIn currently has ten,” says Byza, “and more than a dozen others who have committed to enabling at least one of our core integrations, including Recruiter System Connect and Easy Apply. Our ATS integrations are driven by our partner ecosystem, and we will continue to work closely with them.”

The local stalwart, confident and assured, ignores the interloper. Not a stand without precedent, but a dangerous one.

Consider what LinkedIn did to its competition in France, or more, consider the case of StudiVZ. You haven’t heard of the now-irrelevant platform, but it was, to German students in the Noughties, what Facebook once was to American Ivy Leaguers. When Facebook made its foray into Germany in 2006, it offered four percent of its stocks to take over the VZ networks, but the Germans said no, and today, VZ is floating around the fringes of the web trading stories of what could have been with Tom from Myspace.

Many in the recruiting game consider this attitude a slow suicide. As Daniel Wüstenberg wrote in Stern, the exodus to Facebook was “sometimes creeping, sometimes abrupt, but it was clear: StudiVZ was no longer cool. Cool was now Facebook, it had more features, it was more international.”

Berlin-based Anna Ott brings two decades of experience in TA, recruiting, and HR tech to her current role heading Unleash’s startup ecosystem, and ”stopped using my Xing account years ago. I needed something more international,” but “eighty percent of the Germans I meet at talks or conferences use Xing as their base,” she says.  

Ott, who says she’d be lost without her LinkedIn account,  entertains the idea that “LinkedIn will take over in DACH,” but estimates, at least for now, there is value in both platforms, however, “everyone in the TA game is hunting and hiring people globally. Xing’s problem is that in the digital age, talent is scarce and we have to look outside our usual zones.”

(pic credit: Sprout Social)

Along with the Prescreen ATS, Xing acquired Internations, “the biggest network of expats worldwide,” says Altmann. So while Xing isn’t exactly battening down its regional hatches, it’s hard to see how Internations, essentially an expat meetup group, could compete with LinkedIn’s inherent “globalness”.

HeyJobs’ Luther doesn’t even see the issue in these terms: “The job market is differentiated and dispersed. Xing and LinkedIn are databases that recruiters use to find candidates, but it’s not the best place to hire at scale.”

Given that LinkedIn and Xing’s products cross the line of competition with Heyjobs, Luther would say that, but his views point to a larger issue: that the XinkedIn solution is not necessarily the final one.

“If I were the Xing CEO,” says Ott, “I wouldn’t be afraid of Linkedin. He still has a comfortable zone and reason to exist in Germany. I would be afraid of who will disrupt Linkedin. Whoever kills LinkedIn will also vaporize Xing.”

And who would have the power, the panache, the deep pockets to pull off something like that? The world’s number-one search engine, of course.

“If you’re searching for jobs that can be posted, by Google, in a Google ad,” explains Luther, “that’s how the company will enter the job board market, which will wipe out smaller job boards, and then you’re looking at a new Indeed.”

“If you’re actively searching for jobs – which is a decreasing part of the market – then Google can show you jobs within their own Google Jobs product at the top of the search results page,” explains Luther. “That’s how the company will enter the job board market, which will wipe out smaller competitors, and then you’re looking at a new Indeed.”

And while Xing and LinkedIn monetize their corporate users with the metric of “the more you pay the more your job ad will be seen,” says Ott, “Google Jobs’ UI is designed for employees, not employers, so smaller companies that Xing or LinkedIn wouldn’t chase will become more viable.”

And who knows, if that works, maybe it’d be time to resurrect and implement the stalled social network, Google Plus. And if that were to catch on? It may not be long before we live in a digital monopoly, and start receiving new sets of automated invitations, ones that would read something like, “Hi, I’d like to add you to my professional network on Google Jobs.”

According to tech guru Nick Macario, what’s powering Bitcoin-mania may soon disrupt Recruiting, by toppling Facebook and LinkedIn and returning ownership to individuals.

On February 5, 1637, the children of Dutch tavern-keeper, Wouter Bartelmiesz, gathered their late father’s possessions for a large auction in the town of Alkmaar. Among items up for bid was a small botanical collection that drew both the humble townsfolk and wealthy elite into the auction house. For many, the public event was pure spectacle. For the crafty, there were particular items promising outlandish, unprecedented wealth: tulip bulbs.

Newly introduced from Turkey to the Netherlands in the late 1500s, tulips became the day’s hottest industry. A poet at the time wrote of the Dutch tulip trade, “He who considers the profits that some make every year from their tulips will believe that there is no better Alchemy than this agriculture.”

Highly valued for their novel rarity, tulip bulbs were in high demand, encouraging many nascent investors to liquidate their assets and get on board with the lucrative but risky venture. Tulip prices swelled when certain specimens mutated, following an outbreak of the non-fatal mosaic virus that left irregular color patterns on petals. Garden centers around the lowlands scrambled to keep these rare flowers in stock, and between December 1636 and January 1637, their price increased twenty-fold. Speculation as to how much higher prices could go was rife. Tulips became a futures market.

At the Alkmaar auction, one buyer paid 21,000 guilders for a single lot. Enough to buy two large houses on Amsterdam’s swishiest waterway, the Keizersgracht, or Emperor’s Canal (where today, one floor of one of those canal houses easily goes for a million euros). In the span of a few hours, Wouter Bartelmiesz’s children went from poor orphans to exceptionally wealthy thanks to their late father’s collections, and just in time, too, as the tulip supply, racing to meet demand, soon began to outpace it.

A matter of weeks after the auction, determined sellers were flooding the market, creating a domino effect of lower and lower prices that sent many remorseful buyers into a panic, and any remaining prospectors running for the dunes. In a pattern that has played out several times since, with few takers and an oversaturated supply, the market imploded. So badly that the federal government was forced to intervene, mediate, and settle disputes.

“Tulip mania” is generally considered to be the first speculative bubble in modern Western history. Today, many consider investing in Bitcoin to be the latest.

The current controversy around the world’s most well-known cryptocurrency shares “many of the elements of tulip-bulb mania,” said Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, remarking on the record price of nearly $20,000 a coin in late 2017. Value dropped dramatically between December 2017 and February 2018, and despite a slight increase in March of this year, current price trackers illustrate a diminishing trend.

“All the speculation between cryptocurrency prices cause people to ultimately question how there’s no physical object backing the value,” says Nick Macario, co-founder of dock.io and CEO of Remote.com.

While the risks of investing in commodities like gold and silver — to say nothing of tulip bulbs — are well known, Macario identifies an important distinction: “People accepted gold as the currency standard because it’s a physical object. They feel there’s an explanation for why gold can have a value. However, that worth is disconnected from its utility as gold.”

To adrenaline-jacked trader types, it doesn’t matter. To the skeptical or the parsimonious, unseasoned newcomers are investing in technology few can even explain. At least with tulips, everyone agreed that they were beautiful flowers worthy of admiration. What Bitcoin is, the nuts and bolts that make it work, are almost too abstract to explain fully here. So we won’t. Not just yet.

That’s where futurists like Macario come in. A serial founder who’s launched four companies and honorably exited two, he’s here to demystify the technology powering Bitcoin-mania, the bulb of the thing, if you will. It’s called blockchain, and “it’s sometimes referred to as a pyramid scheme,” says Macario. “There’s a lot of mistrust because many people don’t, fundamentally, understand it. Blockchain technology is not only for cryptocurrency, although that’s the most widely used application for it.”

Macario is using blockchain to power his most recent venture, dock.io, launched this year, which connects millions of job seekers on a decentralized network, one he says will rival Facebook and LinkedIn, only without limitations to user-data mobility.

The way things work now, professionals build extensive profiles, reputations, and experiences on closed business and social networking platforms like Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, even Twitter. But what happens when you decide to shift your personal information onto another network? It can’t be done.

Macario insists blockchain holds huge potential beyond cryptocurrency or freeing your data from Facebook. Macario insists, perhaps unexpectedly, that blockchain is about to disrupt the recruitment industry.

Imagine: when you update your profile with a new job title, it automatically syncs and updates everywhere at once, across all platforms, saving you time and optimizing your online processes. dock.io also expedites recruiters’ manual tasks like conducting background checks. For candidates, deciding which applications can access your data is as simple as toggling notifications on or off.

“We’re empowering the user tremendously,” says Macario. “We’re going to build the largest, most complete resource of data about an individual in existence.”

Given the current climate of massive data leaks and growing concerns over the sale of browsing histories to advertisers, Macario’s claims of freely sharing profiles across the net may sound undesirable, but the ledger records on the blockchain are both continually updated across the peer-to-peer network, and protected by a layer of cryptography distributed across many points, or “nodes”. Any unauthorized changes would require massive amounts of computing power to access the controlling majority (at least 51%) of nodes, and modify them simultaneously. The bigger the network, the more difficult this becomes.

Though the dock.io network may still be in its infancy, it’s scaling rapidly and gaining buzz. This February, dock.io completed its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) — the cryptoquivalent of an IPO — raking in over $20m via DOCK token sales. These tokens decide how data is accessed and shared across the dock.io protocol. Transactions of data exchange between applications and users on dock.io incur a token cost. This token exchange also works to ensure the quality of data, as applications are only rewarded tokens when other applications validate the same data on their networks. DOCK tokensalso grant the holder influential votes over the future direction of the protocol as dock.io scales up in the coming months, much like a shareholder in a traditional company structure.

“We could create a powerful network that helps applicant tracking systems and other CRM systems,” says Macario, “because they have more enriched data to build more and better features, recruit better, and make better decisions.”

*****

Like other blockchain acolytes, Macario’s exhortations bear the burden of public proof. But Macario knows that even when broken down into its most basic elements, blockchain theory is about as punchy as reading a Samsung TV instruction manual. In Korean. But this is tech that may change your life sooner than you think, so let’s try.

A blockchain is an encrypted digital ledger of records, organized into blocks. These blocks are located on servers called nodes, with any nodal computer connected to the network and linked to others, like a chain. Each node maintains a copy of said ledger and informs other nodes of newly submitted or newly verified transactions, allowing information to be distributed securely across an entire network without the need for a central administrator. This is possible because blockchain transactions contain their own proof of validity and authorization, instead of requiring a centralized application.

Blockchain’s distributed database syncs data along all nodes in the chain and protects them with advanced cryptography, meaning that all data on the chain is transparent and immutable. By nature of its decentralized network, the blockchain is extremely difficult to hack, and global enterprises including Walmart, FedEx, UPS, British Airways, and Dutch transport company Maersk, use blockchain to track supply chains, streamline and secure international shipping, solve customer disputes, and standardize global trade and finance.

Even non-profits, fashion gurus, and musicians are integrating blockchain into their business practices. Great for Macario and his cause, likely awesome for recruiting; not so good for anyone waiting for the next Kanye single to leak.

For job seekers, blockchain’s value is clear. They own their data and can share it wherever and with whomever they please, on a secure, verifiable, and decentralized network. After the hiring process, blockchain can protect employee data from falsification and unauthorized changes, since the data can only be modified with the approval of all links in the chain.

“Instead of controlling user data,” Macario suggests, “companies will realize that their model is creating a better network and a better offering. People can freely decide to use their platform, not because they are trapped there.“ Though Macario assures his end goal is to work with large platforms, he confidently claims, “We don’t need Facebook or LinkedIn to grow a huge network.”

Through direct signups, the dock.io network grows by 100k new users each month. Not much compared to Facebook’s 2.2 billion or LinkedIn’s 500 million last quarter, but “where we start to scale is through partnerships with companies like SmartRecruiters,” says Macario. “There are 12 million job seekers a year who are not yet in the dock.io network. When we start integrating them, and then plug into hundreds of other networks, we can scale to build a bigger network than LinkedIn, and do it without LinkedIn.”

Though the balance of internet power could fluctuate in the wake of upcoming data privacy legislation, both in the US and abroad, until data control returns to the hands of individuals, Macario won’t be happy, and we won’t necessarily be safe. But dock.io looks to be instrumental in moving the needle towards empowering individuals world-web-wide and debasing the systems of power that give companies like Facebook enough control to keep a scandal like Cambridge Analytica out of the press for so long.

So as long Bitcoin and others like it remain more an abstraction than something to pay for your groceries with, the cryptocurrency market will remain unstable. But instead of fixating on the tulip-bulb nature of the technology’s fluctuating stock, Macario seeks to understand how the not-so-abstract value of blockchain can herald something as stable as the second-coming of the gold standard.

“It’s just a matter of who’s controlling the data,” he says. “I think eventually it’s going to be the user, and I hope we can do that in the short term. Data will always be the most valuable resource.”

According to German intelligence sources, LinkedIn is now the latest social media network to have been exploited for clandestine political purposes, with China facing accusations it used the platform for espionage.

Germany’s security agency, Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), claims that up to 10,000 fake LinkedIn accounts may have been created with the aim of enticing high-ranking German political and economic leaders to become informants.

Many of the fake accounts are made to represent young and promising Chinese professionals, such as “Allen Liu” — a supposed human resources manager at an economic consultancy — and “Lily Wu” — an employee working for a think tank in eastern China.

So far China has not responded to the claims, although it has refuted similar suggestions in the past.

It seems the BfV believes the target of these fake accounts is primarily German workers in government ministries, with BfV head Hans-Georg Maassen stating:

“This is a broad-based attempt to infiltrate in particular parliaments, ministries and government agencies.”

If this accusation is true, then LinkedIn joins a long line of social media platforms that have been exploited for political gain. Facebook has recently been at the center of controversy regarding Russian state sponsored ‘fake news’ during the recent US elections, while YouTube and Wikipedia is similarly struggling to deal with so-called ‘web brigades’ — groups of paid ‘trolls’ who promote various political ideologies on open internet platforms.

Of course, the very things which make these sites useful and popular, they’re free and open nature, is also what makes them attractive tools for nefarious government agencies. LinkedIn may be particularly attractive primarily due to its high status users and the fact it is one of the few social networks not to be banned in China. Although technical solutions, for example public verification systems (perhaps even a blockchain approach?), could help prevent this kind of abuse in the future, for the time being the best defense appears to be old-fashioned vigilance.

Maassen advised any individuals who thought they had been affected by fake accounts to contact the BfV.

Source: BBC

LinkedIn has come out with its fifth annual list of ten words that are most overused by its 332 million members worldwide. Again, the 12-year-old professional networking site cautions against profiles where people describe themselves as motivated, passionate, creative, strategic and responsible, driven to show off a track record that shows they are expert in their field. The message: Don’t use trite, empty words that may sound good to your ear but say almost nothing.

Here’s the top ten list from 2014:

1. Motivated
2. Passionate
3. Creative
4. Driven
5. Extensive experience
6. Responsible
7. Strategic
8. Track record
9. Organizational
10. Expert

Think about it for a minute and you realize that most of these words are generic descriptors that any employer would take for granted. Merriam-Webster defines “creative” as “marked by the ability or power to create.” In other words, it means you can do stuff.

Instead of falling back on empty terminology, describe your skills and achievements in concrete terms. Don’t say you have a great “track record.” Instead say you cut the annual sales cycle by half.

To compile the list, LinkedIn sifted through the “Summary” sections in profiles worldwide, to rank how often each buzzword appears. There have been eight shifts since last year. “Effective,” “patient,” “innovative” and “analytical” have all fallen off the list, replaced by “motivated” (no. 1), “passionate,” “extensive experience” and “track record.” I’m scratching my head about what this means. Given the ever-increasing speed of digital communication, it’s not surprising that people are no longer patient, though I’d maintain it’s a virtue and has more meaning than the other buzzwords. It’s strange that “innovative” and “analytical” also didn’t make the top ten. To be sure, anyone can throw those words around, but do we not care about those skills anymore? As for the new words, it does seem like it’s in to be “passionate” about your work and how you live your life. Maybe with more people looking to change jobs in the reviving economy, people also feel like they need to emphasize their “extensive experience” and their “track record.”

LinkedIn also sent me a breakdown of the most common buzzwords in 21 countries, including the US, the United Kingdom, India and Saudi Arabia. There is a lot of overlap. “Patient” is gone from everyone’s list, while “effective” still shows up in Saudi Arabia, “innovative” in Australia, France and India and “analytical” in eight countries including Singapore and Sweden (but not the US). Mexico is the only place where people say they are making “continuous improvement,” possibly a positive sign for the country’s improving economy.

One good piece of advice LinkedIn offers: When you’re choosing words to describe yourself, consider the antonym. Would you ever describe yourself as unmotivated or inexpert? If not, leave the positive forms of those words off your profile.

I take issue with one word on the list: “responsible.” While it can be used in an empty way, as in, “I’m a responsible worker,” I also think it can be a concrete description of, well, your responsibilities,as in, “I’m responsible for all of our enterprise sales revenue.” What’s a better way to say that? I suppose you could say “in charge of,” but why use three words when one will do?

That detail aside, I think LinkedIn does a service by releasing its buzzwords list, reminding us all that we should use active, concise words to describe specific achievements.

This article was written by Susan Adams from Forbes and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. SmartRecruiters is the hiring success platform to find and hire great people.

Facebook started as the personal page for students of American colleges. LinkedIn started as the professional page for their parents. With market caps of $58.78 billion and $19.97 billion, respectively, it is clear that both Facebook and LinkedIn have a come a long way over the last 8-9 years. But what have they become? Why do you log into each?

I joined Facebook in 2006 with the purpose of sharing jokes with my friends, and I joined LinkedIn in 2010 with the purpose of gaining a “serious” job. But now that my networks have developed – there is a lot of overlap – my friends are my connections and connections are my friends.

Today the truth is that the average age of the Facebook user is 40.5, and the average of the LinkedIn user is 44. What is the difference between what a 40 year old and a 44 year old talks about? As both companies approach saturation point – solely in terms of number of American users – I believe we are seeing a deviation to the mean in terms of content shared within the platforms.

Today, there are three reasons I log into each Facebook and LinkedIn: (1) news, (2) fun & (3) meeting people.

Firstly, it’s news. When it comes to breaking the news, both LinkedIn and Facebook continue to gain market share (and Twitter too of course), and there is only so much news, which makes overlaps in status updates inevitable. When news breaks – whether it’s national news or the news of my friends – I often learn about it from my social networks. I mean your network talks about what your network talks about. On what website did you hear and read about the Zimmerman verdict? Or the Boston Marathon bombings?

Facebook has changed the way we consume news. It is the updates for the people and companies we friend and like. A good social network is the pulse of who we choose to be connected to online.

LinkedIn has increasingly built features similar to Facebook in order to make it a more socially friendly place: text updates, image updates, people tagging, and company pages. With the addition of company pages, the public has been given a direct line of communication to any given company. Where will the potential customers and potential hires choose to communicate with your company?

In the long run, Facebook and LinkedIn learn from each other. Will LinkedIn continue to follow Facebook’s social networking features and build a feature like LinkedIn instant messaging? Or, will Facebook start following LinkedIn’s use of the editorial line and build a feature like Facebook Today?

Secondly, it’s fun. When it comes to fun, LinkedIn is becoming more like Facebook. At least it seemed like it this week. It’s kind of like whatever the software, or place, my friends will share what they want to share. A friend from college (a funny writer) created Exhibit A:

These days on LinkedIn – while I’m connecting to business professionals, sharing my professional thoughts, and reading professionally produced content – more of my friends are messing with me as they used to on Facebook. Oh Erika, how nice of you to endorse me!

Additionally, an anonymous source told me a story: man marries woman, and the next day woman endorses him for “Strategic Partnerships.”

Thirdly, I use Facebook and LinkedIn to meet people. Yes, I use LinkedIn more to set business meetings and Facebook more to set personal meetings. But I also use LinkedIn to meet colleagues outside of work, and Facebook to set up work meetings. Increasingly, as VP of Path Matt Van Horn said at a recent SmartRecruiters event, people are Facebook friending all their business connections.

Friending people who you do business with is not a black and white moment. Your friends can become your future hires, investors, customers, or business partners. Your colleagues, investors, customers and business partners can become your future friends.

Both Facebook and LinkedIn want you to grow your network – often promoting the user to import email contacts – and they have very similar algorithms to suggest “People You May Know.”**

And don’t think that Facebook isn’t also learning from LinkedIn. The LinkedIn InMail – the ability to pay ≈ $10 to message anyone  – was followed by the Facebook pay-to-message feature, where the cost to message a stranger (depending on the size of their network) ranges from $1-15.

**Facebook and LinkedIn also have a similar algorithm and functionality to connect people with companies. When you like a page on Facebook, you receive a prompt of “Get Updates From Similar Pages” and when you view a company page on LinkedIn, the right hand column advertises “People Also Viewed” X companies. LinkedIn and Facebook both want you to like and follow as many companies as possible in order to host the exchange of information from company to person.

So what does this have to do with recruiting? It’s hard to recruit people without knowing their information. Today, the information about your talent, accomplishments, networks and ambitions are – more than anywhere else – stored on Facebook and LinkedIn.

The SmartRecruiters mindset is that candidates are already keeping their professional information somewhere (LinkedIn, Facebook, your own site, etc.), and our job application is here to let you choose – and quickly share – the information source that best fits the job you are interested in. The application process should be only a few moments: connect with Facebook/LinkedIn, write short (tweet-style) message to the hiring manager – and just like that – interest in job expressed.

The simple of it is this: more of my friends are connections, more of my connections are friends, and more businesses are in my newsfeed. Oh to be connected to your friends!

David Smooke is Director of Social Media @SmartRecruiters, the hiring platform with everything you need to source talent, manage candidates and make the right hires.