The Economies of Finding New Employees on LinkedIn

15

October

2017

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LinkedIn is a platform, which brings together job seekers and job providers. According to Chaudhary (2017), the platform had 467 million users world-wide in April, 2017 and was available in 24 languages.  94% of recruiters use LinkedIn to vet candidates and 48% use LinkedIn for social outreach (Smith, 2016).

Analyzing these numbers, it can be concluded that LinkedIn is an essential tool for the employment process. However, seeking out for jobs and searching for employees on LinkedIn, significantly differs from how recruitment worked before the internet age. One factor that changed for instance, is that recruiters can view an applicant’s academic and job history without the applicant noticing that (s)he was vetted. 80% of LinkekIn user use free accounts, meaning that they cannot see, which recruiter viewed their profile (Stemann, 2016). Before the internet, jobs were assigned by employees and executives using  personal relationships or through applicants’ personal initiation. In both cases, their was a lot of information asymmetry involved and both party’s knew, that they were in a matching process.

However, LinkedIn reduced the information asymmetry significantly and allowed for starting matching processes anonymously. The question arises: Which implications does the establishment of LinkedIn, have for the search process on the employment market?

The article “One-Way Mirrors in Online Dating, A Randomized Field Experiement” (Ramaprasad et al., 2016) observed the effect of anonymous search on the matching process and outcomes in the dating industry.

According to the aforementioned research:

  1. Anonymity of profile viewing significantly decreases the number of matches.
  2. The increased match quantity is not compensated by an increase in match quality.
  3. Anonymous users explore and visit more profiles of users who messaged them, before deciding to answer a message.
  4. Anonymous users are more compelled to visit the profile of the other user before deciding to reply.

Assuming that these findings also apply to LinkedIn employee search, the following implications can be identified:

  1. Recruiters now vest much more applicants before deciding on whom to contact than before LinkedIn was used as a platform for the job market.
  2. With LinkedIn, the recruitment process became more time consuming but the outcome of decision after the extensive search did not improve.
  3. In case recruiters receive a message of a potential applicant on LinkedIn, they are much more susceptible to comparing the applicant with other applicants instead of evaluating whether the applicants match the job criteria.
  4. In case recruiters receive a message of a potential applicant on LinkedIn, they are more inclined to investigate the applicant’s history and qualifications using LinkedIn than before as more information is available.

References

Steman, 2016. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-linkedin-subscription-should-you-buy-lindsey-stemann/. [Blog Post]. Retrieved, 15.10.2017

Chaudhary, 2017. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/linkedin-numbers-2017-statistics-meenakshi-chaudhary/. [Blog Post]. Retrieved, 15.10.2017

Smith, 2016. https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/linkedin-job-statistics/#.WeOMTWiCxPY. [Blog Post]. Retrieved, 15.10.2017

Bapna, R., Ramaprasad, J., Shmueli, G., and Umyarov, A. 2016. One-Way Mirrors in Online Dating: A Randomized Field Experiment. Management Science62(11), 3100-3122.

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Want To Start An IT Business That Builds On New Technology But You Don’t Study IT? – A Strategic Advice for Business Students

2

October

2017

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There are 2 types of lead entrepreneurs. The Founder and the CEO-Founder.

The Founder has often spent her whole life in the industry in which she starts her own business. Even if she is young, she starts it using technology she is familiar with, she understands the interests of her customers due to deep expert insights and works with people she trusts. Examples include the founders of Oracle and Google or Inditex (Zara, Bershka etc.).
The Oracle and Inditex founders were both 40+ years old industry veterans when they started their business. They knew everything about their customers’ needs in detail, the technology and sociological aspects of the industry. They had a passion and built sustainable businesses that resemble their life time work. The Google founders, even though they were not that old when they started, were the biggest tech nerds you could imagine who knew everything about the problem of searching for knowledge and had a lot of tech insights which helped them solving it. They hate the admin side of doing business, having transactional relationships with partners and other CEO related activities to that day and work both in functional IT departments of the company.

The CEO Founder knows the business game. She understands that anyone with a business that grows in revenue, employee count, reputation and value created for stakeholders, will lift off, if she keeps her head and a strong team long enough in the game, figures stuff out and does not get bankrupt. Few people have enough persistence and conviction to do just that. Examples include Mark Cuban (Broadcast.com), Richard Branson (Virgin Airlines) or the Samwer Brothers (Rocket Internet). These people knew nothing about the technology or products they built or had experienced their customers’ needs for a long time before they started. Mark Cuban did have no IT or Film industry background, Richard Branson did not work as an engineer or as a pilot before he started Virgin and the Samwer Brothers did not work in food delivery or home supplies industry before they started Hello Fresh and Home24. They understand basic human needs for entertainment, travel and shopping and know that investors seek for profitable opportunities. Moreover, they realize that very few people understand every technology in depth, know all laws or all business scaling issues. They understand that you can buy expertise and figure out a few things along the way, as long as your business has a perspective. What they play is a purely strategic game that is sometimes criticized as not being sustainable. It is not played by many people successfully because it is exhausting to work in a field in which you sometimes have as much questions as your customers in the beginning and the pressure of dealing with so much uncertainty as a founder is tough.
Let’s assume a management master student (e.g. BIM) would want to start a business today that involved new technology or information systems in the fields of IoT or AI customer support for instance.

As far as my judgment allows it, 95% of them would fall into the 2nd category of founders.
There are thousands of people worldwide that try this approach. They deal with the operations, the financials, the legal aspects, the marketing side of business and after a while, they realize how hard the competition is and how little profit is left at the end, subtracting all admin expenses.

But what is the competitive advantage that helps you win this game and capture enough market traction to be able to overcome the financial trouble of the first couple of months/years?

The answer is: Information
What all these management student separates is the amount of industry knowledge they have and how quickly they learn. You need to have information about all kinds of industry players, talented engineers, niche technology and trends before anybody else does. If you leverage the access to critical players and resources you can offer a superior product and get most of the stakeholders’ attention.

What is especially critical: You need to know these things, even before the authors and journalist of famous technology/innovation magazines such as TechCrunch or t3n do and write articles about them. Because as we learned again from our dear friend Michael Porter: If your competition has access to the same opportunities as you do and leverages them, you will not gain a competitive advantage. But how can you overcome this race for information and resource access?
Tech-Facebook Communities!
Having worked in an early stage, new tech, new market start-up, a large portion of my work was to browse and be active in these groups. The amount of information and mutual support in these communities of which I have selected and stated a few below, is incredible. You can ask tech-related questions regarding the latest cutting-edge products and services, search for developers or designers and be at the frontier of the latest movements. I have literally seen Tech Crunch, t3n and other tech-magazine authors write articles about discussions that took place in these FB communities or people who lead the groups or contribute to them weeks later. This means if you scan these groups and interact with members regularly, you will have information and contacts before the early majority. Many community members also helped each other improving their investor pitches or find suitable employees for their start-ups in private chats that emerged from the group activities. If you combine your business skills of managing resources, people and attention with the insights from these groups, you will have a strategic advantage!
Selected Tech Communities:
1. Young Creators Group                               https://www.facebook.com/groups/youngcreatorsgroup/?fref=ts
2. Bots                                                               https://www.facebook.com/groups/chatbot/?fref=ts
3. Artificial Intelligence & Deep Learning https://www.facebook.com/groups/DeepNetGroup/?fref=ts
4. London Tech Startups                               https://www.facebook.com/groups/londontechstartups/?fref=ts
References:
https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/founder-vs-ceo-who-creates-more-value

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