Follow Companies on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has had a Follow Companies feature for a while, and it means exactly that: follow companies and their updates within LinkedIn, without being connected to anyone in the company. Once you follow a company, you can see who in your network is employed at that company, and how distant your relationship is.

The image above shows a snapshot of the Harlequin company profile on LinkedIn. You can see a blurb about the company, information about anyone in your alumni group that is employed at the organization, as well as your LinkedIn connections to people in that company. Clicking on the Careers tab will also show any available jobs, as posted on Linkedin (though you are usually redirected to the company website for an application). If you explored the New Hires tab, you could see the profiles of new hires, as much as that user allows according to their privacy settings.

You can also see any employee traffic, such as position changes or promotions, that the user has recorded on LinkedIn, as well as links to mentions about the company in the news, as shown below.

For librarians, there are many libraries listed on LinkedIn, as well as publishing, software and tech companies, in addition to the universities and colleges, not to mention the many companies who may have a special library in your preferred industry, such as law, finance, manufacturing, or healthcare, just to name a few. It can't hurt to start monitoring their activity on LinkedIn.

However this is only the activity recorded within LinkedIn. For example, if a person does not update their profile when they move to a new company, you may not know if a company has made a new hire. The Follow Company feature still provides very useful information about organizations, their employee turnover, the number of hires that they are making, and indicates if you have anyone in your online network who could get you closer to a permanent or contract position or offer a recommendation.

Gender Battle on LinkedIn

LinkedIn asked the question, who is the better online networker, men or women? Apparently, this can vary by industry, and men come out ahead in some industries, cosmetics for example, and women come out ahead in some industries, such as ranching, where you might not expect them to be the better networker.

LinkedIn's definition of a savvy networker is:

A professional with a robust network of trusted business contacts who actively work toward creating new career opportunities for themselves and the people in their network

I am not sure how LinkedIn decided to measure this, based on the blip on their blog: is this by number of contacts (so LIONs win bonus points?), based on activity on Answers, or InMails (which you pay for)? Did they survey members and ask for best networker nominations and look at the gender of the nominees? If I overlooked this in the blog or you know more about the measures used, I would love to have that in the comments.

One other question: what if the best networkers are really on MeetUp?

For more on this topic:

• Is LinkedIn a Gender Equalizer? from FastCompany
• LinkedIn Data Reveals Men Are Savvier Online Professional Networkers Than Women from Yahoo! Finance

No recommendations?

Since I spent the weekend reading What's Mine Is Yours, I am interested in the concept of generating an online reputation. From a collaborative consumption perspective this reputation would generate: how good a buyer/seller and loaner/borrower you are, all available in the online.

Using reputation, making an introduction or a referral is not new and recommendations were and are based on character as well as caste. Using an online community to make recommendations may allow us to circumvent the caste aspect of the recommendation--I can see and write a recommendation for my plumber, for example, a person who may not live in my neighborhood or have gone to college with me, but which my social network can access and decide whether or not to hire him, or let him couch surf in their house in London, a privilege not available to previous generations of plumbers.

There are systems in place to keep track of reputation: eBay's star system for buyers and sellers, is just one example. In the realm of business networking, LinkedIn has a reputation manager, the Recommendations field which allows users to write recommendations for people who are in their LinkedIn network. You can vet any recommendations written for you and hide them if you don't want them to be visible, revealing them again when you think they might help. But should an employer be able to stop employees from writing recommendations for their network connections on LinkedIn? Workforce Management has an article on when and why to craft a LinkedIn referral policy, but I think writing referrals, in the age of "collaborative consumption" is much bigger than the people we work and have worked with, and it may not be possible to forbid a person from writing a recommendation, considering the varied places where a recommendation can be input and our coming ability to search and sort individual reputation.

Rachel Botman's TED talk about collaborative consumption and what it might mean

Events match students with real world projects

The ESADE business school in Spain matches students with real world projects in a speed dating style of match up. This type of idea could certainly work for other schools, to either get students to projects where they can hone their skills, or for non-profits to find students who have skills that they need to get projects done.

How about that collection development project that library students have to complete--I bet there are some non-profits in the area who could use that help--or marketing or knowledge management...the list goes on.

As as aside, if you're in the New York Area, Catchafire to matches professionals with non-profits that need skilled volunteers. 

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SimplyHired Job Seeker Report

Last month, SimplyHired released their Today's Job Seeker Report, to explore and explain the behavior of job seekers--which will help HR professionals post jobs.

As far as the assistance for job seekers, the report breathlessly states that 86% of job seekers look for work on the Internet. Not a surprise--we look for everything, including TV, spouses and wart cream--on the Internet. But what most job seekers should get out of this report is that networking still works--with 37% reporting that they got their last job through networking--and so few job seekers do it, with only 32% using networking as a job search strategy. According to the report, more respondents used the newspapers (!) than networking.

But what was really sad about this report: 53% of respondents said that their college major was not relevant to their current career.

JobPrize and other Job Referral Networks

Adding a financial incentive to job seeking and rewarding a connection is not new--there are plenty of companies that offer bonuses to employees that find a candidate that they can match to a currently open job, but JobPrize allows a job seeker to post a profile and offer a reward for finding the matching job.

The job seeker registers on JobPrize and offers a reward for the person who can find the job that they want. According to the About Us section of the JobPrize website, the job yenta should just be employed in the industry. Ideally, what I think they hope will happen is that an accountant at a hospital will make connections with nurses on the site because both work in the healthcare industry. They recommend the person to the position and if the match is made, the matchmaker can claim the prize.

I'm already detecting some problems with this: you don't know these people. This means they aren't in your network and you really shouldn't trust them.

• What if you end up recommending someone who lied about their education or ends up needing some serious anger management training? 
• Do you have to disclose your relationship to this person if HR calls you to find out why you recommended them? 
• What if the job seekers discloses how she found out about this position and it turns out you will be double-dipping: getting prize money from the job seeker and claiming the recommendation bonus from your employer? 
• How do you know that the job seeker, once they secure an interview, is going to be good for the bounty? The site states that the job seeker needs to put the prize into an escrow account, but how do you know if she really got the job--and owes you some money?
• What happens if the site is taken over by people who have better research skills (*cough* librarians) who spend their day finding job ads to match the people on the site, hoping to score prize money?

I don't mean to be a party-pooper but part of a network means you should trust and be trusted--which requires building a relationship, even if it is online. I won't undermine online networking, especially if you have done work for the person at a distance, but a referee should have some idea of your skills or personality and not put you forward because you offered them cash.

And guess what I found when I was searching on the topic? A patent filed for a job referral network system.

Other peer-to-peer job finding services:

• LinkedIn (via the referral system on their job board) 
• Ntroduction
  
• ReferYes
  
• TugLink

Spotted on Springwise.

How to set up a networking group

Virginia Henry of LIKE has provided a basic article about how she and other knowledge professionals in London created their own networking group. She also provides some advice on how to create your own informal group.

They use LinkedIn, but you could also use MeetUp, though MeetUp is far less formal (better for book clubs) and doesn't include the professional credentials and resumes of group members.

Employers sidestep recruiters...from the Globe and Mail

WK4US has been having a discussion about how to use LinkedIn properly for finding work, and one of the members of the list posted this article from the Globe and Mail, Employers sidestep recruiters to tap social media.

The employers are using social media, but they are also exploiting the power of weak ties--finding a job through an acquaintance. They are using the "refer a friend" feature found on many online networking sites. This means that if in your circle of friends, they come across a posting that would be of interest to you and they pass it on, just as the workers in this article are posting job opportunities on their Facebook walls for their friends to read.

Chances are many of your friends have a similar background and skill set (you can read Mouw's articles about social capital for more on this topic), and employers are tapping into this via social networking. It isn't new, though the medium is making it more visible--not everyone would see the posting for employees on the church bulletin board.

The interviewed employers in the article appear to mainly come from the retail sector.

LinkedIn API

This comes via the SimplyHired blog, a video from LinkedIn about how developers can use the LinkedIn API to create job searching tools on the web.

Stalked off

Now, I know the article [Stalk your way to a new job] was tongue-in-cheek, but I don't recommend stalking individual people at an organization--you should follow news stories and items about an organization. If the people that work there happen to publish and you might end up working in their department, you should read their publicly available work. But staking out their Facebook page?

According to the article,

Within minutes, you can find out where he’s from, how to reach him, where he’s worked in the past, and – perhaps most importantly – what his favorite movie is. The more you know about him, the better your ability to sell yourself.

Not so fast. This depends on a few factors.

1. The person is online and is accessible. This mean that they keep their blog or their Facebook profile out in the public sphere on their own name. Lots of people don't.
2. Even if you think you have the right person, how do you know that you do? Plenty of celebrities have people who name-jack them (would that be Twitter jack?) but I know quite a few people who have misspelled potential colleagues names.
3. For librarians, many of us know where the privacy settings are. And we teach others where to find them.

A far more helpful post would have been how to find out information about a company and their prospects, especially for privately-owned or small firms not listed on the 500 that Fortune slavers over each year.

LinkedIn benefiting from the economy?

Is LinkedIn benefting from the downturn in the economy, with more employers supposedly:

• Using connections on LinkedIn to fill positions?
• Job seekers using LinkedIn to look for work?
• Mean that increased traffic could lead to a high profile buyer?

If you are thinking about adding LinkedIn to your tutorials on how to use the Internet to find work, make sure that you also investigate how active local groups and alumni associations are, not just what the LinkedIn tools include.

Cross posted at Coagitating

Job Angels

ERE has a post about a recruiter who is using his Twitter network to help "just one person" find a job.

This can work for librarians if you use two methods: one, library recruiters and HR managers share out their postings on Twitter, or, two, a local network is posting jobs that will help people they are connected to. In both methods, you need to have people subscribed to your tweets to get connected to the postings (a if the bird chirps in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? Web 2.0 conundrum).

Tis the season

to run panic-stricken and screaming through the halls, under the weight of all of the extra programming, gearing up for the January term, finishing all of your overdue projects and, yes, for our friends in school, exams. This is also when we come to term with some of our new assignments, projects and events. Could Santa spare a few elves?

This is also the time for end of the year mixers, where local professional groups to check-in with their members. If you have time, this is your opportunity to start scoping out the local people and talking about how much you would like to work at library X and asking when the new postings will go up. Yes, seriously. Now is the time to find out about hiring plans and try to get introduced to HR people at mixers--too bad they sometimes mix at their own mixers, but you can work with what you've got. Mixers can be vital when you plan to work local, but they can also offer good leads on upcoming conferences and projects.

So, go out and have a beer with your friends and alumni, but keep some rules in mind:

• One beer is enough beer. It may look cheerful and taste like you're standing on your back porch in summer, but drink with caution.
• Don't eat so much. I'm not saying, don't eat anything, but don't eat fifteen curried pickles or five devilled eggs and find yourself chipmunk-cheeked in front of the director of the library who's hiring. Martini olives are not considered sustenance, and flicking your toothpick is as distracting as a five-year old twirling her hair.
  
• Dress with care and leave the funny hat behind. Friday casual, including jeans and a toasty sweater is fine, but the heaving cleavage of your New Years dress is not.
• Don't bring your resume. You are looking for intel, while trying to look intelligent, so it is ok to give out a business card--especially if they want your help on a project or if you would like to get in touch with them in the new year--but your resume is just going to get sprinkled with curry pickle juice. Accept their business cards, but you may just have an opportunity to make notes on a napkin--which you should not lose, so carry a notebook. Follow-up after the holidays since in-boxes get overfull in December.
  
• Make a good impression. The best you can, not as the person who drunkenly giggled and gorged on amuse bouche.

If you think, pshaw, I will never do these things, you haven't been to too many holiday mixers, since they are filled with gorgers, bingers and sweatily-palmed paperwork. And stop using pshaw.

Turn to your friends

Drawing inspiration from Tropic Thunder, Career Diva has a post on turning to your friends in a workplace crisis. Her thoughts are pop-y and timely, but this is a really old career idea: the strength of weak ties.

In 1973, Marc Granovetter wrote an article, The Strength of Weak Ties, where he explored how a group of people found work in Boston. Based on his research, which he later turned into a book called Getting a Job, he suggested that people can use their social ties for different results when finding a new job. First, the type of tie you use is important:

• A strong tie, like a family member or person who has a deep connection to you, can help you find work, but sometimes in a different industry (mainly because they are in a different industry, and hear about different opportunities and because they might not know what librarians, for example, do for a living) and they are highly motivated, because of their close connection to you, to help you find work. 
• Weak ties, on the other hand, are your acquaintances, people who you have a looser connection to, maybe even friends of friends, who are usually in the same industry, and who hear about more relevant job opportunities, but who have less incentive to help you because they are more distant to you personally.

So close=more love, but less relevance, and weak=less interest, but more relevance.

Now other people have explored the weak tie theory--especially when examining social networks--and they have drawn some conclusions, such as college students aren't so good at activating weak ties because they don't have a broad network of industry contacts, and they tend to turn to family and friends for assistance. Others suggest that activating a weak tie can keep you within your industry, whereas relying on a strong tie can help you transition into a new industry.

But the one thing research agrees on is that no matter how weak or strong the tie, you have be vocal. You must say: I'm looking for a job, do you know of any openings?

Here is how you can start activating your ties:

• We are not all in competition with one another. You may be surrounded by library students who are all going into the job market at the same time, but you are not all competing for the same positions. Some of you want to be children's librarians, archivists, media specialists, corporate librarians, so you are all part of the industry of knowledge work, but not all competing in the same sectors. But you need to start an exchange of postings and job information. To do that you...
• Need to speak up. This is time to talk about careers and how to find them. It is also the time to get in touch with former co-workers and supervisors and go to coffee. The holidays can offer great opportunities to mix and mingle, but you have to talk.
• It's time to bring in the experts with exposure to industry, and a variety of sectors. If there was ever a time to form a job club in your library school, get in guest speakers who can talk about resume writing, interview skills and finding internships, it's now. Panelists, speakers and librarians invited to parties should represent all types of library work, and should also include a generous helping of self-employed librarians. These guests should include new and established librarians, since new librarians can talk about how they recently found their jobs and established librarians can open the channels of communication to their library contacts.

 If this sounds suspiciously like networking, you're right. But what do you do if you aren't good at networking?

ReadWriteWeb launches jobwire

ReadWriteWeb has launched a new service called jobwire which asks people with new jobs to send in a message about their new job, a kind of tech Movers and Shakers. These services are a great way to stay on top of the industry, find out where some of your contacts have gone, or do some brush-up research on a person's career prior to an interview with them. If you work in the tech field and have just scored employment, this might be one way to boost your personal google juice, and get some free exposure for your employer.

ReadWriteWeb, if you aren't interested in writing in tech, is a blog about web technology news and reviews, a very accessible site for people who are looking for information and how-to in using technology in knowledge work. If you have ever considered a career in information services, IT, wired journalism, subscribe to ReadWriteWeb.

LinkedIn Maintenance

Jason Alba of JibberJobber has a good post about some basic LinkedIn maintenance that you should perform on your profile: make sure the main email address for your LinkedIn profile belongs to you. It shouldn't be your employer-supplied email and it shouldn't be your college email, since those aren't yours and have a limited lifespan. Hypothetically, you will want to keep your LinkedIn profile for the remainder of your professional life.

The same goes for your LibGig profile, or really, any social networking profile you maintain. The address you use should not be the most convenient, but the one that you personally "own",

How do referral programs work?

There is a post on ERE.net today about getting more bang for your buck out of referral programs on college campuses. If you aren't sure what a referral program is, here is how it works:

• Your friend or family member works for a company that regularly disseminates job postings throughout the company--or they make a habit of checking an internal job board with offerings.
• There is a notice that the employee will get a referral bonus if a candidate that they recommended for the position applies, interviews, receives an offer and accepts a job. The referral bonus is usually cash and can range from $50 to $2000, depending on the position and how hard it is to staff. (If you know anyone in nursing, they are bombarded with offers).

Just to be clear, the referrer gets the bonus, not the person that was hired--but once the new hire is on staff, they can start sending out postings to their friends and family.

If you are looking for work in special corporate library, or an information position with a corporation, you need to talk to your friends about where they are working and ask them to include you in the postings they send out to friends and family. If they don't know what you do, or what you want to do, explain what you are looking for. Take a look at their company's website and get an idea about the types of positions that they post by what you can definitely do and what you could kinda do.

There are a few reasons to be wary of these referrals: if you blow off the offer, will your friend be mad? Maybe. It could also take time for the bonus to pay out--up to six months in some cases, and usually not before your probationary period ends. But this is a good way to get job postings delivered to your in-box, and if it all works out, your friend might be very very happy. And you'll be employed.

Check out the H3 network to get an idea about how this service might work on the web. I received a recommendation to use this service from someone on LinkedIn, and though I haven't found anyone for a position, I am still hoping it might work for people in my network.

I also feel like I am referring people (I'm your really weak tie) to postings when I put up the Yahoo! Pipe for library jobs and the Career Jet widjet, though I don't expect any back scratching for it.

I don't have any friends like that

Think about who's in your network.

Common Craft explains LinkedIn

What is LinkedIn? from LinkedIn Marketing on Vimeo.

Spotted on iLibrarian.

I think this can give you an idea and even explain networking. But the true benefit to LinkedIn, for job seekers, is that there are many human resource professionals on the site. Many of them are LIONs--many of them are not, and hate the idea. They pay a lot of attention to the Answers section, so you should be in there answering and asking questions, when relevant to your expertise. I have gotten recommendations from strangers, but LinkedIn connections, that I have been able to use in my work. You can use it in your job search, but you need a bigger network than other librarians and your college pals, so you have to make connections to people, usually by answering and asking questions.

That is the power of LinkedIn: you can expand your current network, which is limited by geography, and connect with people, linked to you by others or who ask to be introduced to you. But sitting passively on LinkedIn is not going to get you anywhere.

It is about who you know

I came across this article Why Some Companies Retrain Workers and Others Lay Them Off and I thought it would be a simple get mad skillz or get a pink slip article. It's actually, a make friends article.

Peter Cappelli, a professor at Wharton, studied why some employers retrain and others layoff (also called, churning, like a feeling induced by a roller coaster). What he discovered was it was not policies that saved an employee, but relationships: how many they had, how valuable and how much the employer valued the relationship.

What is social capital? It’s a tight network of relationships within a workplace...Because it is an asset that exists between individuals rather than within each individual, social capital may suggest why it could make sense to reinvest in and retain individuals even if their job-specific skills are obsolete: The relationships they maintain with others may create value that extends beyond their ability to perform their current job.

Cappelli is also pretty clear: stopping for a chat on the way to get a coffee is not social capital. Social capital is sharing what is in your head for the betterment of others, giving and getting in return. The less you give, the less you can have. This doesn't mean it is the most important measure--I can have low social capital but still have the power to fire everyone--but I shouldn't give away the most important pieces. And those people know more and share more.

If this argument is true, having fresh skills is important, working for an employer with high social capital very important (for more about corporations and social capital check out Linda McQuaig's All You Can Eat), but if you have noticeable connections to people in an environment that values those connections, you can weather the storm. So serving on a committee--one outside of the library so people can see you--instead of writing another book review, may be in your best interest.

This is also called networking, but I didn't want to scare you.

And finally, service providers will be affected by the layoffs because companies are "externalizing" the cost of retraining. This can include the library. If you have some skills that people need to learn--reading, writing, figuring, word processing--you can certainly find private employment.