LinkedIn is “the” top place for many recruiters and for many people I have met “LinkedIn” is almost equals “sourcing”. Everyone we had placed in the last year was initially contacted on LinkedIn.

We all agree on the importance of not spamming candidates and carefully reviewing their profiles before we reach out.

However, LinkedIn's nature is not fully understood by many, I think. Here's what I read on a blog post on ERE today: “Examine the resultant profile summaries…. “Red flags” are things like: no photo, no companies listed, no contacts, vague titles, no work history, background missing, etc. Skip these profiles.”

Two questions about this approach are:

(1) How does the absence or the presence of lots of information on someone’s profile correlate to them being a matching candidate? I would say it does for people whose jobs require their presence on social networks, such as social media managers, marketers, and recruiters. For a geologist, a doctor, or an engineer it seems irrelevant. (Did you know that Oracle’s CEO tweeted for the first time just a few days ago?)

(2) Is it worth using LinkedIn to only search about 10% of its profiles, that do have the complete info, such as past companies and plenty of keywords, and ignore the 90% remaining profiles that are "shallow"?

Those of us who look into searching for “shallow” profiles, modifying searches accordingly and cross-referencing the Internet for more data, will be, generally, ahead of the competition. It’s not rocket science and can be figured out. Of course, if you already find great matching candidates and keep the pipeline you need, there’s no need to look for the shallow data.

We should have more posts about LinkedIn since it’s so important to all of us.

Irina
http://www.linkedin.com/in/irinashamaeva