CollegeRecruiter.com, a job board featuring entry-level jobs and internships for recent grads and students, has launched a new LinkedIn networking feature on their site.
Job seekers can now see the LinkedIn profiles of employees at a company they are applying to in order to find familiar faces.
“One of my biggest frustrations with helping college students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs is that many don’t yet know how to network,” said Steven Rothberg, President and Founder of CollegeRecruiter.com. “It isn’t that they’re stupid or lazy. They simply haven’t been taught. So how do you get a Gen Y’er who grew up with computers and can hardly remember a time when the Internet wasn’t at their fingertips how to network? One way is to guide them to the best on-line tools and remind them to use those tools over and over again. And now the hundreds of thousands of college students and recent graduates who use CollegeRecruiter.com each month will have easy access to one of the best on-line networking tools: LinkedIn.”
CollegeRecruiter.com joins a long list of other sites who are collaborating with the professional networking site, including email organizer Xobni, vertical search engine SimplyHired, TechCrunch’s Crunchbase, and LexisNexis.
August 6th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
Congrats to Collegerecruiter.com on the partnership with LinkedIn. This is very smart for students and companies. The question I have is around facilitating connections - Given that most students are not going to have a developed biz network how will they be able to connect with people they find on LinkedIn given the “rules” of LinkedIn. It would be cool if LinkedIn had a feature that allowed Users to optin to hearing from students and that as long as there was a collegerecruiter.com “tag” they could connect directly. Maybe I’m missing something in how this will work and would like to hear more. Thoughts?
August 7th, 2008 at 1:08 am
Susan, I think that you raise some great questions. I think that this is an awesome feature, and it’s something that I’d like to integrate on One Day, One Job, but you’re right. Not many college students have the network to make this work. The “rules” of LinkedIn do prevent people from contacting others whom they don’t know. Even if you’re not supposed to contact the people, I think that there’s still value. Looking at the profiles of someone who has succeeded at a company that you want to work for, can give you a lot of insight as to what career path you should take. That’s perfect for college students!
I commend Steven on adding this to CollegeRecruiter, and I would love to see LinkedIn open this feature up to wider adoption across many sites (finding any info on their API is nearly impossible).
August 7th, 2008 at 1:25 am
LI’s company beta made the site even more valuable for students and LI may say that direct access can be purchased - but that isn’t appropriate for a student for many reasons.
As for ODOJ - go for it!
August 7th, 2008 at 9:49 am
I think college students would find even more relevance with a collaboration with Facebook. It’s free, and they would be most likely to find recent alumni or familiar faces when applying for jobs on CollegeRecruiter. I know CR has a Facebook page, so a partnership wouldn’t be out of left field.
August 7th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Vanessa, I just hacked together a LinkedIn and Facebook feature for One Day, One Job. I couldn’t find a way to access the LinkedIn API, and I don’t think Facebook offers this type of functionality. It took about 2 minutes to write the code, and 10 minutes to write the blog post announcing it. The solution isn’t perfect, but it’s still pretty cool.
You can find our announcement here: http://www.onedayonejob.com/blog/do-i-know-anyone-at-company-name/
How about a shoutout from Cheezhead for being the first (that I know of) to allow you to check whom you know at company via Facebook?
August 7th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
Willy - just took a quick test drive on what you implemented on ODOJ. Congrats - well done and very impressive that you moved so quickly to implement. Students will benefit from seeing the connections and learning about who makes up the companies their interested in.
August 8th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
I work as a recruiter for a Boston based staffing agency, Hollister Staffing (www.hollistersatff.com) and just wanted to say what a great partnership this is. We use LinkedIn quite a bit as a recruiting tool, and have found it to be very effective. It is great that you are giving college students an opportunity to use this resource!
Lori
August 31st, 2008 at 1:12 am
Sort of the flip to this…from the recruiter’s perspective…I just completed working with a vendor that built a plug-in app for Salesforce.com for recruiting that tells you what social networking web sites your lead or contact belong to.
So, if I just parsed your resume into my salesforce.com or imported your contact info from Jigsaw or ZoomInfo I now know what social networks you belong to… and your profiles there are only a mouse click away…I now have the option to connect with you on one of those sites vs. sending you basic introduction email or a cold call. You could even automate the invite.
I’ll be demoing this at Onrec in Chicago during my presentation in a week or so. Below is a link to a screen shot of what this looks like for Mr. Social Network, Shally.
http://www.dailycareer.tv/images/shally_network.jpg