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The S.P.A.M Principle and LinkedIn Dominance

There have been many contenders for the next big thing in recruiting and hiring software, but no one has been able to overtake LinkedIn the same way it dethroned the job boards of Web 1.0 and created a whole professional identity ecosystem. They lost a recent Internet popularity contest with policy changes involving freezing user accounts who used certain browser plugins, but at the end of the month recruiters and hiring depts around the industry will still pay their subscription fee, because no single tool is better. Why is that?

LinkedIn Recruiter dominates, because it meets the four criteria of an effective sourcing tool that I call the SPAM Principle:

  • Searchability: Can candidates be searched and refined easily?
  • Profiles: Are candidates data arranged in an user friendly fashion?
  • Availability: Are there a lot of candidates?
  • Messaging: Can you contact candidates?

For any sourcing tool or method to be effective all four have to be met. This is why recruiters or companies that try to go cold turkey with LinkedIn Recruiter will be at a disadvantage compared to their peers. And you can compare any sourcing tool to SPAM.

  • Github has Messaging (sometimes) and Availability, but can the average recruiter say what the candidate does in their Profile other than a language they used and a project they contributed to? And can they refine their Search confidently enough to say these 10 people are viable candidates? Not really, so you have to use other sources to fill the gaps.
  • Custom Search Engines (CSE): Depending how you construct yours, either Messaging or Availability will suffer.
  • Stackoverflow: Availability and Search exist but Profiles and Messaging could improve.

The scattered sources like GitHub, Stackoverflow, and Dribbble were a reason Candidate Aggregators like Entelo or TalentBin were able to thrive. Also the job of aggregating and building profiles must have been easier when public LinkedIn profiles were easily scraped (the good ol’ days).

How can SPAM help you? If you’re a startup building the next sourcing platform, use it as a template of what your recruiter customers will need. If you’re a company deciding on a new tool, see how it stacks up to SPAM. If the database is searchable with profiles and a contact tool, but only has 2 people in it, is it worth the price? And if you’re a recruiter or sourcer trying a new sourcing workflow, keep SPAM in mind and you’ll never go hungry.

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