Linkedin is a different form of job board that targets people with jobs and some discussion content based on their network connections. Beyond that, it's actually a pretty limited networking tool, because it's not open -- it's more of an online rolodex to keep track of the people that you have already met. Most of the people with whom I'm connected on Linkedin are those I met in the real world. The others are spam-linkers. Introducing yourself to new people on the website requires either purchasing a pay-per introduction product, or submitting your introduction to a chain of potentially uncooperative members connecting yourself to your target. So networking is pretty constrained. (Xing, on the other hand, is more open, but we'll examine that later.)
OK, so targeting people based on networks makes sense -- since networking is how most people get jobs anyway. However, the cost for job posting is still a constraint. And keeping a job within a network precludes the scenario where a candidate finds a job outside of their network.... silly me, I thought we loved the Internet because it can link people with opportunities and information that was not available before...?
Monster.com and Internet 1.0 job posting was actually going in the right direction: it was making opportunities available to a far broader audience than before. However, Linkedin and similar Internet 1.5 companies (no, linkedin is not Internet 2.0) didn't continue evolving this model, they actually constrained it to the old-world dynamics of using personal networks to find jobs. While this is gratifying in the short-term - providing an incremental improvement to the recruiting process- it actually begins to reverse the progress towards global job and worker movement that monster.com had begun.
So why did this happen? Because of spam applications. People put a job requirement on monster.com and got 1,000 applications from unsuitable, unqualified candidates. In response to this, Linkedin and similar companies fall back on the old world solution: keep the job in the family, keep it in the network.
So what should we do? Should we go back to monster.com and put a spam filter on it? Well, no, not exactly. Network information about a person can be a valuable differentiator, but that information is slowly starting to open up as Web 1.5 companies become 2.0 companies by opening up their websites with APIs - so that the network information about their members can be extracted and applied to a job matching process.
Here's the scenario: I go to www.Jobboard2.0.com or a similar place where there are 1,000 billion jobs listed. I log in. This creates a cookie on my machine, with aggregated information about me pulled from various sources on the net -- zoominfo, rapleaf, linkedin, facebook, all kinds of places. This cookie is read by the big matching engine on Jobboard 2.0, which then pre-selects suitable jobs for me to see (so, if I'm an unsuitable would-be job applicant spammer, I'm filtered out, and never see a job for which I'm unsuitable). I can a much more select list of jobs. I can have my own preferences as well, which narrows the selection even more. It might not need to use a cookie, but creating a normal account might be too time consuming and cumbersome.
So what is all of this? Matching, matching, matching. Of course, the matching engine guys will benefit greatly from this - WCC, actonomy, probably a host of others.
It's also a much more liquid economy for job applicants and jobs. The suppliers and value adders in this economy are:
- Conduits: Big fat pipe conduits who get and transport the information about candidates;
- Information Providers: Websites and services that can provide unique and interesting information about candidates, which then goes into the Conduits.
- Matching Engines: Who do the best job of matching candidate to job.
But wait -- we've only explored one half of the equation: candidates. What about the jobs? More on that later.
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