Is LinkedIn Selling You Out?
LinkedIn feels like a more pristine social network than most. It dubs itself “the world’s largest professional network on the Internet” with 150 million members as of February — and 27 million of those being “decision makers”. We post family photos and cat videos on Facebook. We await a call from a recruiter and share industry articles on LinkedIn.
Signing up is a perfect win-win. We get to post our resumes online free, and LinkedIn does the heavy lifting of making it searchable for recruiters. Those recruiters will pay up for faster, better ways to find talent.
But now LinkedIn is using our profiles for more than just job searches. With less than usual public fanfare (no press release) LinkedIn a few months ago started rolling out tools aimed at salespeople. This makes perfect sense. A salesperson’s edge is information, and what better place to learn about prospects than a network of user-generated biographies? LinkedIn calls this “social selling” wherein a “cold call” becomes a “smart call”.
