LinkedIn, through technology, will make almost everyone transparent–easy to access directly.

The issue I have is no matter how good a 3rd party recruiter is, unless internal recruiting is too busy to track down candidates or they have too many reqs to fill rendering them overwhelmed I ultimately don’t see what role 3rd parties will provide internhls can’t making 3rd partids obsolete.

Now students may make up 28% of the profiles, and yes I teach and coach at Fordham University. College kids do think LinkedIn is a joke. They are also fearful to create profiles because of the judgment they will receive from professionals in the industry for awhile.

So you are defining the success of a recruiter based on how much money they make right? You billed X amount so that makes you a great recruiter. I would love to see recruiters given commission based on how productive the candidates they place into certain roles are. Now I bet the billing numbers would look a little different.

Recruiters are judged on quantity and not quality. Rob, what do you think would happen if recruiters were judge on candidate productivity rather than the quantity of placements?

You may disagree with LI’s strategy, but they were just ranked by Forbes as America’s fastest growing technology company.

Successful 3rd party recruiters don’t suck. They’re great at what they do. Commission works wonders because if you suck, you’ll fail. It weeds out those who can’t cut it.

That said I don’t USE those recruiters because I don’t HAVE to. But they’ll be fine.

By all measures LI is successful and only getting better.

Now you see LinkedIn COULD have been the pulse of what’s happening, but they went too macro too quickly and the result is 60 million college kids think LinkedIn is a joke. There is no substance to the site. It’s just made for third party recruiters and making their life easier. In Jeff Weiner’s book, the Start Up of Me, he openly admits to disliking academia even though he adamantly speaks passionately about in some YouTube clips. He contradicts himself often when he speaks about the validity of education and networking with professionalism. Also there are 230 million profiles and I am taking a wild guess in saying half of those profiles have 50 connections are less.

I would love to see the activity numbers of every user. Its just like Coursera, these new massive online courses are supposed to be great right? Well there average enrollment for a class is 50,000 people and you know what their average completion rate is? Less than 5%. Its shocking and actually humorous.

Now Jeff Weiner saw the money, and did not develop his idea from the inside out instead he took the easy way toward the riches. He went macro first over micro. This is the wrong approach. He also never made preparations about the prospect of 3rd party recruiting actually becoming instinct. When it does, LinkedIn will go under with recruiting.

When was the last time you read a biography or did some research about the philosophical approaches of Jeff Weiner? I would be scared if I just accepted his approaches because he doesn’t account for a lot of different varying factors.

3rd party recruiters water down the process with cold calling, spam and template messages, and their only drive is the end goal: The Commission. They have no conceptual understanding of the actual professional skills they are recruiting for and they have the tendency to place people in the wrong positions. This in turn decreases productivity in the work place because people are ineffective in their jobs.

Now A recruiters are usually exceptional, but when you take generation Y kids right out of college who are forced to recruit because there is not enough jobs to support their real professional desires their thoughts become clouded by the end goal: The commission. What happens? B and C recruiters destroy the workplace.

Abraham Lincoln once said, “If I had six hours to chop down a tree, then I would use four of them to sharpen my axe.”

Someone is sharpening their axe, and they are going to chop down LinkedIn and 3rd Party recruiting with one swoop. No one will be able to stop it because it will happen in one quick motion.

3rd party recruiting will always have it’s place. To think they’ll die is rediculous. Truth is most inhouse recruiters can’t cold call anyone. Until they can, 3rd party recruiting is permament.

LinkedIn is well positioned to help depict a macroeconomic picture of what roles are open and what skills and competencies are needed to fill them. In my opinion I see a future where LinkedIn becomes the BLS data analtyics wearhouse of the working world. It’ll show the pulse of what’s happening.

Internal corporate recruitment will definitely survive. I just feel 3rd party recruiting is disrupting the flow of effective productivity at work.

I invite you to connect with me on LinkedIn and check out my passion for education and effective economic change.

http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=187998579&trk=nav_responsive_tab_profile

I believe those who for some reason haven’t yet been impacted don’t see anything, technology hasn’t adversely touched them.

When it does, they’ll be howling.

How’s business for most of you? Plenty of quality fillable positions to work on? Companies agreeable to working with you? Fee resistance? How often do companies need your services? Billings/production up? Relatively easy to do business?

We always have had till 2001 really two things to worry about in our business. One, competition. Two, government policies worsening the business climate/recessions.

In 2001 we started worrying about globalization, offshore outsourcing to primarily India and China. And in the past 5 or so years it’s now technology/social media/LinkedIn.

Advantage we always had was an ability to access passive/invisible candidates our clients couldn’t including calling into their direct competitors. Those advantages and days are on the road to ending. Technology will enable more and more professionals to become visible and allow companies greater and greater access to them requiring less need for we 3rd party recruiters.

If you think having a book of contacts will make you special exempting yourself from the massive cost cutting underway in ever single industry, you’re a God Damn ostrich.

One day, as happened to me, your contacts will say, “Gee, Jack/Jill, my budget got slashed for recruiting,” or “We now have a team of 10 internal recruiters to fill our openings wanting to give them a shot,” or “we’re unable to use recruiters for the forseeable future,” or “We find we’re able to find good candidates on our own,” or “Business is off, we have a hiring freeze,” or “We’re laying off.”

You all decide what the cause is. My business has been off for years and I’ve been at this since 1980. Maybe if the economy was great and companies had too many reqs for their Talent Acquisition team to handle things would get better–but does anyone see that happening in the near term?

Is it because of President Obama’s anti business policies? Competition? Globalization? Or Technology?

But seriously, how are you really doing?
And are you really confident about recruiting’s future?