LinkedIn’s Massive Data Will Increase … But Passive-Candidate-Recruiting Competitors Say Its Advantage Won’t

LinkedIn’s killing it when it comes to gathering data on each and every one of us, with each and every one of us doing the work for it to populate our profiles and thus collect that data.

That LinkedIn mother lode will keep growing, says Jon Bischke, founder of Entelo. But so will the rest of the world’s information — information that we won’t be putting into LinkedIn.

“LinkedIn has a huge chunk of data on the web,” Bischke said at the Recruiting Innovation Summit in San Francisco. “LinkedIn will have more data, but a smaller percentage of all the data.”

His point — one in which he has a vested interest — is that Entelo, and competitors like Dice (with its Open Web tool) as well as TalentBin are building up vast amounts of information, and it’s stuff that’s not necessarily part of the faux-resumes, endorsements, groups, and updates we’ve come to know on LinkedIn.

Bischke says one staffing team, looking for some super-hard-to-find mobile engineers, found four of them in six weeks using his product.

TalentBin’s founder Pete Kazanjy agrees that LinkedIn has a near “monopoly” on information on business professionals, but says he considers that a “short-term” advantage.