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.
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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 comefrom 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?
maxoutli.blogspot.com | January 7, 2015 | Dan Stiffler
http://maxoutli.blogspot.com/2015/01/recent-college-grads-linkedin.html