Monday, March 02, 2009

LinkedIn - good that went better and could go through the roof

I have to admit that I'm a LinkedIn junkie. I use it throughout the day, reading about what people are doing, thinking and most important of all, who they connect to. Whenever I meet a person or hear about someone I check them out on LinkedIn. If needed I ask someone in my network that knows this person to put in a word or two for me before I make contact.

The latest tool I started to use was the TripIt application that lets me see who is close in a city I'm visiting and announcing to my network where I'm heading in the future to simplify contact.

Here's my humble suggestions for improvements to the great LinkedIn team:
  • My greatest pain right now is how to keep my CV updated in the corporate repository and the various sites on the web.
  • Why don't LinkedIn offer a closed private space for employees to store their profiles? 
    • One could select which data would be private and which would be available through the public LinkedIn profile.
    • Searches returns hits in the public LinkedIn network plus internal resources
    • Staffing Managers and recruiters could search on Linked public + private and find resources inside and outside of the company. To connect with people outside the company they just have to contact the person knowing the searched for person
    • Integration with corporate HR and recuitment systems would have to be done through a Web services API or similar.
  • Thus I only have to maintain my CV at one place, what a world that would be.
  • Based on a subscription fee LinkedIn would get more revenue and users.
  • For companies this would lower their system costs (close down one system), utilize already existing networks of their employees, simplify access to brain power and use true cloud services.