LinkedIn is changing rapidly, but it is not enough!
I am super engaged with my career. My job is my primary source of money, my instrument to travel, and my only hope to retire early. I need to know how to be on top of the game, excel in my industry, learn what skills to pick up, and which businesses to follow. I spend hours every week to keep myself informed.
Personal brand struggle.
I am an active LinkedIn member. I love the platform. My account has over 2,500 connection. Currently, I am trying to increase my profile views and especially search appearances. What I learned so far, the profile views can be easily hacked with correct tools and tactics. Search appearances are much harder. They depend on keywords and skills. This article dates back to 2017 — little has changed. Like Petra 4 years ago, I can see how many times I appeared in the search, where my searchers work, what they do, and keywords my searchers used. Below is my current statistic.
From the above, I can conclude that my present colleagues and my old colleagues are visiting my profile. Great! The rest is useless. The so-called keyword “Specialist” is not even present on my profile a single time. I have no clue why it is listed.
If I were to click who viewed my profile, the data summary is even worse. I will have a list of individuals and 5 insights at the top, describing how many of them work for a certain company or share a similar job title.
I want to have more data! How senior are my visitors, which industries they are from, what common skills they have? How long did they spend on my profile, where did they click, how did they find me? Any additional insights can assist me in developing my personal brand and excelling in my current job.
One week I can have 100 views. Another week 7. Same with search appearances. There is no consistency. I find it extremely hard to understand trends with the provided data. I do a #fridaythoughts post every Friday morning.
Some weeks it performs very well, like the example above 7k+ views, and other weeks people say it is not on their feed. Why? How do I improve my discovery? Today, I cannot even list all my posts side by side to compare statistics and find out what works and what doesn’t and why.
I crave to know more. I will pay to know more! I am sure LinkedIn can deliver more! They have the data! But time and time again, they choose to direct the R&D towards corporate offerings rather than individual user experiences.
Job seekers struggles.
This is where it gets interesting. LinkedIn sells our data to corporations. Businesses do talent planning, develop strategies to source the best candidates. LinkedIn has a tool in their Talent Solution corporate offering called — Talent Insights.
Talent Insights is an intelligence platform where recruiters and HR can analyse the market. It allows them to check supply and demand statistics, run workforce trends for any organisation, define skill gaps, identify fast-growing skills in the competitor organisations, review who other organisations are hiring, how much they are paying them, check if the talent is engaging with the jobs the firm posted. Quite a powerful tool!
When I saw the tool, I was straight away thinking, this is priceless for any student, job seeker or top performer aiming for a promotion. Imagine dissecting individuals in the desired trade/position to determine what education they have, skills possess, industries worked, locations based.
With such data, I can build up my career growth plan. Be strategic around acquiring new skills, compare companies, places to live and job positions to aim.
Watch it! It is just fantastic! Well done, LinkedIn! My immediate thought was — where do I sign to get access?
The answer is — you can’t! The saddest part about this tool is that it is not available to you or me. I contacted the LinkedIn sales desk to ask if I can subscribe to the Insights, to be told:
Hi Ludmila, unfortunately not, Talent Insights is a feature as part of our overall Corporate Package. There is no off the shelf pricing with our corporate tools. The solution is built bespoke based on the organisational recruitment needs and goals! To give you a very rough ballpark figure, packages can start from 8–10K on a years commitment.
Well, 10k is definitely out of my affordability range. So there we go, member data is being sold to corporations, and members themselves cannot access it.
Game Over
For an average person, it is a game over scenario. Unless LinkedIn creates an affordable and accessible version of Insights, we will be again and again left behind. Members create the data points, fill in salary surveys, populate their profiles, make connections, post articles. We are the data, but there is no way we can buy access to it.
The big corporations have the path to real-time data and will be ahead of the game. Firms will pick up trends, skills, salaries, demands, hot spots. They will optimise their spending, choose locations for new offices, etc. As for people like me and you, well, we either play along or not, but we can never win the game.
Instead of giving job seeker and professionals access to the Insights data, LinkedIn drip-feeds us with articles like this or this. Alongside you can have access to some general company by company insights, considering you have a premium account. The below example features LinkedIn Corporation. The amount of data they provide is more than ever before, but it is still not enough. For instance, if you were a job seeker, you cannot compare two/three companies side by side.
I want more.
Imagine how much better the individual decisions could be. A 17-year-old kid living in Amsterdam and interested in computer science could check the top in-demand skills, potential graduate earnings in his city. Compare with other areas. Take a data-driven decision on his major and study location. Want to move for cheaper housing and a better school district? Good luck finding the hotspots with a considerable demand for your skillset and minimal salary reduction.
Today no individual can shop for the best relocation option based on their skills, salary expectations, companies active in this area, supply and demand ratios, diversity statistics (yes, there some exposure to data via LinkedIn Salaries and Glassdoor, but the quality of reports does not compare). On the other hand, businesses can shop around for the cheapest talent in a specific skill set. It just hurts.
Final thoughts
Don’t get me wrong. I love LinkedIn! I am a member since the very inception of the platform. LinkedIn is fantastic. Some of its initiatives will change the whole hiring landscape. They are very ambitious. Recently they started to beta test skill paths. The idea is to enable less fortunate candidates to compete for jobs. I think this is a fantastic initiative.
I love it to bits, but I am not happy about restricted access to the insights. LinkedIn can sell my data, no issue. Data is their core business. But please make it fair, trade it to both sides. Don’t enable employers via disabling the employees.
Millions of specialists across the globe, myself included, wish to grow their professional brand, examine post statistics, understand their visitors and why they are here. We want to know trending skills in our industry, examine employers, check retention rates, salaries, and other statistics.
I want to understand how secure my job is. I want to not only compare myself to other applicants for a particular job. I want to compare myself to my peers and colleagues. I want to check how I stand against people who are already in the desired position before even applying for the job. I don’t want to be left behind. I deserve to be informed, and I am ready to pay for it.
Ludi F
