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!
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?
