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Picture Yourself Where You Want To Be

I recently received this marketing communication from LinkedIn, featuring a YouTube video. The video shows children talking about what they want to be when they grow up, and they are juxtaposed against images of successful professionals doing those things. The message is that you can follow your dreams and succeed. It's cute.

LinkedIn marketing communication promoting
http://imagine.linkedin.com

The website accompanying the campaign goes on to explain how some of the professionals featured in the video use LinkedIn to do their current jobs. For example, a chief merchandising officer uses it to discover vendors for unique items. And that's it: end of communication.

What I find interesting is that LinkedIn isn't set up very well for people trying to "follow their dreams". I've worked hard to grow my capabilities. I average two hours per day studying work-related topics to expand my reach. For my career, the signal-to-noise ratio on LinkedIn is mostly noise.

I get lots of contacts from tech recruiters based on my current and previous job titles. The pitch is often a form letter inviting me to take the same job title or an equivalent position. Some recruiters pitch positions where I would take a large pay cut, a more junior title and relocate at my own expense across the country to a more expensive area. I really like my current position, so my next one definitely won't be a lateral move!

"Technology recruiting is broken, and LinkedIn is positioned to fix it." 

Leveraging the enormous volume of career and skills data, LinkedIn could build a model that predicts how people progress in their careers. With such a model, the system can predict the most-likely career outcomes for each user. Based on feedback from the user, and on changes to the user's profile and network over time, the predictive model could be continuously adjusted.

For professionals using the site, this means the system can provide meaningful guidance about career options and how to build necessary skills for success. This could tie in with LinkedIn's recent focus on building informative content by pointing users to relevant articles, topics and groups. This capability would engage users between their job transitions, which is traditionally difficult for career sites:

"Users disengage when not actively looking for a job: most career sites are useless during stable employment."

On the recruiting side, a data-driven approach moves recruiters away from simplistic keyword-based searches that dominate current practices on LinkedIn. Some skills are easier to learn than others. For a strong software engineer, improving communication skills is hard but learning a new programming language is not. Recruiters often misjudge critical success factors for openings they represent.

LinkedIn can help recruiters understand which skill profiles can transition into the skill profiles the employer is looking for. This gives focus for recruiters and improves the resulting in-mail quality for the rest of us.

This marketing communication plays on the idea that LinkedIn enables its users to follow their dreams. By building the right data models, this vision could come closer to reality.
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