College Students and Recent Grads, Standout and Be Found: FAVAR Education Codes

In my last post we discussed the challenges college students and recent college graduates face on LinkedIn.  The complexities of attempting to find a recent college grad with a  specific degree and major is a formidable task, to put it mildly. 

LinkedIn search is not designed to efficiently handle such a search.

Recruiters and employers are forced to accept the fact that they will not be reasonably able to explore the complete talent pool. It would take too long.

Oftentimes it is fair to assume that the best candidate may not have been given any consideration as it was just too difficult to find and filter through the profiles.

Recognizing this problem, we went to work on a solution and developed “FAVAR™ Education Codes”.

FAVAR Education Codes is a systemized way of expressing educational degrees.  The Codes can be used on LinkedIn, other social media outlets, and resumes.  Simply adding “#” to the front of a Code makes it searchable on Twitter.

There are three components to every Code:

1. Degree Level
2. Year Graduated
3. Major

Here is the code for someone graduating in 2015 with an MBA:

Mqq15BUADq (we use “q” in the Code to make the Code unique)

The Codes enable recruiters and employers to instantly identify people with specific educational background.  They are like heat to a heat-seeking missile for recruiters and employers – when they are used.

Go ahead, copy and paste "Mqq15BUADq" into LinkedIn search and see for your self!

Recruiters may run a search with the following criteria to get broader results over several years:

"Mqq14BUADq OR Mqq15BUADq OR Mqq16BUADq"

The Codes will work for everyone who has a degree, but they are most beneficial for college students, recent college grads, and those with highly specialized areas of study, or advanced degrees.  It actually gives them a chance to standout and be found!

They are also free to everyone and can be downloaded from our homepage: www.MaxOutLI.com – without providing any personal information.  We want everyone to use them!

The downloadable PDF also includes detailed instructions, or you can watch the video.

The codes will only have value if they become widely used.  Please tell others about FAVAR Education Codes!

Recent College Grads: LinkedIn Disadvantage

Recent College Graduates are at a competitive disadvantage on LinkedIn.

There are at least two major aspects of the functionality of LinkedIn that make it more difficult for recent college graduates, or soon-to-be-graduates, to be found, evaluated and contacted for suitable opportunities.

Overcoming these challenges is critical to their success with LinkedIn.

With the emphasis LinkedIn has been placing on growing their student market – claiming to have over 39 million students or recent college graduates as members – one would think that LinkedIn would want to find ways to improve the outcomes for this membership segment. Instead, many become frustrated and pursue career opportunities through other avenues.

The two aspects are:

• The LinkedIn search algorithm tends to operate under the concept that “more is better”
• The Advanced People Search is not designed to easily identify students or recent college grads
  
  

There is probably very little LinkedIn can do about the first issue. Typically “more is better”. Someone with 10 years of experience should rank higher than someone with two years of experience, right? Someone with more relevant skills should also rank higher than someone with fewer skills.

But, not everyone wants to hire the candidate “with more”. Sometimes less experience is in order.

I don’t see LinkedIn changing their “more is better” search algorithm, nor should they. Members of LinkedIn need to accept how the search algorithm functions and create their profile to obtain maximum results – especially the relatively inexperienced members.

The second limiting aspect, the fact that the Advanced People Search is not designed to easily identify students or recent college grads – even in LinkedIn’s pricey Recruiter Corporate account – is disappointing.

Quick, find someone who graduated in 2014 with a Bachelor’s in Accounting within 25 miles of Des Moines, IA. There isn’t an efficient way to identify all such LinkedIn members.

At the minimum it would take hours to consider all members matching such basic criteria!

Why? To select by an Education “ending date” in the Advanced Search, a user must first select a “school”.

Even after selecting the school, or schools, the search doesn’t look for profiles matching the Education criteria in a single Education entry. Instead the search criteria can come from multiple Education entries within the same profile.

Therefore, someone who majored in accounting from 1975 to 1983, attended a university through 2014, earned a Bachelor’s degree in Recreation in 1986, and lives in the Des Moines area – would be included in search results. Not exactly the type of candidate the employer seeks to hire!

When running a search with the criteria above, 256 results were returned (taking into consideration the top 16 represented schools) but only two of the first 25 search results were of members who actually graduated in 2014 with a Bachelor’s in Accounting!

With all of their technological capabilities, LinkedIn can do a much better job of helping employers identify recent college grads. It would only require adjusting how the Education entries are searched.

What are your thoughts on this issue?