Why Recruiters Can’t Find Active Job Seekers on Linkedin

Linkedin has over 50m members. I believe it’s the most powerful recruitment tool on the web. But, like many other recruiters I suspect, I do get a little frustrated with it sometimes. Unemployment numbers are up and this recession has left millions of people worldwide out of work. After 17 years of economic growth many professionals who were previously considered the “talent” of the market, have found themselves out of work for the first time since they left education. I’ve blogged before on how I think Linkedin could assist active job hunters by making them stand out from the 50m.

Recruiters have the jobs (although not as many as before) so why not make it easier for them to find the active candidates?

Why hasn’t linkedin taken this step already, there are two possible reasons as I see it:

a) They are not aware of this issue.

b) They do not want to add an option to search for active candidates as it might see them lose revenue from inmails or job adverts.

Linkedin is generally very responsive to their community of members and so I have to believe this must be something they are not aware of.

At this year’s onrec conference, I asked Kevin Eyres, the European MD of Linkedin if there is going to be an update to members profile pages, to allow their members to highlight that they are actively looking for a new position. He announced that they have just added this functionality. I think he mistakenly thought that the addition to select Job Inquiries as something you are interested in hearing from people on.

Now, no one I have spoken to in the Online Recruitment Training sessions I run understands the difference between selecting “job inquiries” or “career opportunities”. The linkedin blog and help section make no explanation as to what the statuses mean. Linkedin for dummies defines it as follows:

Career opportunities: If you’re looking to augment your skill set so you can advance your career, or if you want to network with people that could approach you with a career opportunity now or in the future, you’d want to select this setting.

Job inquiries: If you’re open to receiving job offers or interests from other companies, you’d want to select this setting.

Confused? Well this next part is only going to add to the confusion. When recruiters search for candidates on Linkedin they have the option to search for members based on these contact settings. We see this option listed as the opportunity to search for “potential employees”. Now I would suggest to all recruiters reading this, that you ignore this option but that’s another blog for another day.

This is the crazy part. If you select that you are "interested in career opportunities” your profile will show up when recruiters search using the "show me potential employees” option. But your profile WON’T show up if you selected that you are interested “job inquiries” instead of “career opportunities”.

So come on Linkedin! 50 million members means you must have several million active job seekers as members, hidden in your network.