This week the professional social networking site LinkedIn announced a new feature (initially) aimed at current college students, the LinkedIn Career Explorer. This new capability provides the student the ability to visualize potential career paths based on their field of study, search for relevant job opportunities, find and follow target companies matching their career aspirations, and discover and connect with people who themselves are connected to these potential career paths, companies, and key influencers.
Sounds pretty awesome, actually. And a far cry from what is typically available for students from their campus career center, or the shady alumni or fraternity contacts who many students have traditionally turned to for career advice. According to the LinkedIn blog, the Career Explorer capability will soon be extended beyond the college student crowd and likely will be rolled out to the millions of working professionals who make up the LinkedIn user community. Yep, a cool new, networked, and exciting career planning tool rolled out to the LinkedIn population, which happens to include most, if not all, of your organization’s high performers, solid contributors, and recent ‘future stars’ who just might be wondering if they made the right move hitching their wagon to your horse.
For those organizations that have not developed or evolved more enlightened and active career planning and development programs for their top talent, the emergence (or at least the potential emergence), of a more structured, powerful, and widely available mechanism to make it easy for talented employees to plot their own next career move, to connect with the right people to make that move more possible, and to proactively pursue their goals has to be, at some level, really frightening. Call me cynical, but for some reason I get the feeling the LinkedIn Career Explorer won’t be ‘guiding’ your marketing manager to that lateral move to an operations or purchasing job that you’ve been trying too hard to convince her to take. You know, to round out her experience.
The thing is you could be right about the lateral, developmental move. You know her, her skills, the feedback on her performance review and talent assessment from her director. You understand the importance of a stint in operations for future VP-level talent. It is the right move. But unless you have laid the groundwork, made it clear that she is on the fast (or at least accelerated) track in your shop, and that this lateral move is an expected, and important step for her development, then you are halfway to losing the argument to the social web.
And even if you have done all the necessary planning, communicating, and developing to convince your marketing superstar to spend the next 18 months negotiating bulk purchasing contracts for industrial lubricants, the folks at LinkedIn are likely to be painting a picture showing Marketing Director or VP of Digital gigs at some of your most interesting competitors as the next logical step in her path.
It used to be, you’d only have to worry about competing recruiters luring your best talent away to what is usually seen as an uncertain path, now it looks like soon your friends at LinkedIn may help guide the way a little more clearly. But don’t be afraid, if you lose that top marketing manager you can probably find another one soon enough.
You did upgrade that LinkedIn account, didn’t you?
Meh.
Sorry Steve, but you could have written this post about Monster, Hotjobs, Craigslist, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc. when they were all launched.
Agreed that this is another tool that will help job seekers find their next role, but everyone of the sites I listed has done that too.
Great companies will adapt and learn, the rest will try to fight it.
Life goes on.
Why didn’t they have this when I was in collge?? I’m not sure how realistic each ‘path’ is as this is a relatively new service. I encourage my clients (who are still in school) to take full advantage of their Alumni groups on campus. Speaking to alumni in their chosen field can really give them a honest look of what path is possible and probable. Then they can make the choice if they still want to pursue a position in that field.
Time will tell if this tool really catches on with the students, and it will depend on how LI markets the product directly to the campuses, how quick students adapt to this, etc.
The career centers arent likely to promote this wildly I would not think. It would make parts of their job obsolete. MOST schools (not all) dont do a great job of marketing their students or guiding them to that 1st job, aside form schedules and calendars of what companies are holding events there. Not sure they want to further work themselves out of a job.
What I’ve seen is that most students, while familiar with LinkedIn (maybe even only in name) dont tend to use the site as much until they are in the working world. The upper echelon (10% maybe?) do use it, but the rest rely on career services and word of mouth.
It seems like a great tool, and it could alter the college recruitment process. Nice post, Steve.
Thanks for this informative post Steve, interesting development. Think your closing is fair – we need to see how this will work out for employers eventually. Initially my thoughts would be that this tool brings good value to the LinkedIn community and is another reason to join. (…in the end, it can help to have/keep updated data >> which makes a great source for employers…?)
@Avi: You might be right on similar tools (eg. Monster had a great splash earlier with their new interface and their advanced search capabilities looks pretty cool), however LinkedIn has set a standard as public business profile. It has the potential to become the default resume online (if not already) – time will tell if the others sites can compete with that.
You are a good writer, Steve. I hope that you are right, that employers see their best talent going to the competition and get smart about communication and retention. On the flip side, I can totally see this backfiring on some employees who tend to be career hoppers.
Anyone who is interested in making an interesting career move needs to be able to articulate her own wishes for development and advancement. Algorithms are certainly useful but at the end of the day no job is a perfect match – it is a two way street that requires communication on both parts.
There is something to be said for each of us being willing to endure some ebbs and flows in our working situation and as a small business owner I see that as a key attribute of anyone I hire.
Looks like a great idea! Knowing what’s ahead especially when career direction seems to be more prevalent than the actual job these days. It’s also extremely helpful to know people connected to the field you’re interested in. It could be groundbreaking…hope to test it out soon!
@Avi – Not sure I agree that the sites you mention have done all that much more than aggregate openings across a wide range of industries and skills that may or may not have relevance to a candidate, and certainly don’t offer any assistance to the candidate to make personal connections that may assist them in the search.
@Tom – Thanks for the comments, much appreciated from someone that has direct knowledge of the college grad search process
@Pete – Thanks so much, and I hope all is well. Good point about the low percentage of students with effective LinkedIn profiles, I see this every class I teach.
@Mvanetten – Good points, the end result could be beneficial, as employers may see their own openings turn up as ‘suggested steps’ for external candidates as well
@wellnesssucks – thanks and very fair points for sure
@Scott – thanks and good luck!
linkedin is a really good tool to develop professional network and make yourself looking ‘involved’ potential employers and agencys appreciate these bits of ‘credibles’.
Hi Steve – thanks for highlighting this LinkedIn tool. LinkedIn has already been a revelation in terms of networking, but eventually its real power might be enabling a more efficient matching process between talent demand and supply. If most of your current and future talent pool is publically available in one place, then the only people with “Fear and loathing” will be the traditional recruiters.
Great article which was chosen as one of the Top 10 HR Transformation articles in October from HR Transformer Blog.