Last
year we employed well over one hundred consultants. In just about every case we reviewed the
consultants' LinkedIn pages to try and gain more information or insight into
their experience or skills. One of the beauties of LinkedIn from a recruiting
standpoint is that it quickly and easily gives you a good idea about the
persons' core skills, experience, education background, interests and
involvement within their professions. I find that I am thrown to making quick
assessments, both positive and negative, based on the persons' profile:
Positive
assessments are generated from things like having an easily understood summary
section, a large number of professional
recommendations, having a clear career progression, graduating from top-tier
universities, and listing some of the tools that are in demand within my
industry. When these items do not appear, I am thrown to making negative
assessments.
What
is important is that neither the positive assessments or negative assessments
that are generated are necessarily true. In my industry having the ability to
create an excellent LinkedIn profile is not one of the core competencies we
look for. The fact that a number of professional recommendations does not
appear on the page does not mean that the person is not highly qualified with a
number of peers willing to rave about their skills and experience. But it is
important to know that your LinkedIn profile will produce an assessment so you
want to do whatever you can to generate a positive assessment as often as
possible. There are a number of excellent resources out there for how to create
a great, impactful LinkedIn profile and I will leave it to the experts to weigh
in there.
For
all intents and purposes, your LinkedIn profile becomes your public persona.
That is until the information contained cannot be validated. We are all
responsible for every word that appears on our LinkedIn profiles and every word
needs to be factual and verifiable. We recently had two instances where the
exact opposite occurred.
In checking professional references we asked to speak
with one of the people that had published a recommendation on the candidate's
page. It turned out that the conversation was very different from the words
that appeared on the LinkedIn page. It turned out that the person that left the
positive comment had only worked with that person for 2 months and they were
only peripherally working on the same project. I just don't know why you would
want to publish a recommendation from someone in this kind of situation.
Additionally, why would you have not mentioned the fact that you had only
worked with that person for a couple of months and offered up another person
that could speak in greater detail about your skills and experience? The entire
experience left me wondering about who and what I was potentially hiring. This
should never be the case after checking a professional reference.
The
second instance came when we conducted a background verification on a
consultant for one of our clients in Illinois. The consultant indicated that
they had a bachelors degree and listed the year the degree was awarded. Our
background verification company was not able to verify the degree and it turns
out that the consultant had completed all the class work but not all of the
graduation requirements. Had the LinkedIn profile listed "All coursework
completed" or some other qualifier there would not have been an
issue but that was not the case. None of this was an indication of the person's
skills and experience. But it did raise questions about their judgment and
integrity - questions that could have been easily avoided with more care in what appeared
on their LinkedIn page.
No comments:
Post a Comment