The last social network you will ever need and the hardest one to leave. Recruiters are starting to realise LinkedIn will do for them what Uber will ultimatley do for Taxi drivers.

For now LinkedIn is the social network that workers and recruiters can’t live without. It is becoming clear that LinkedIn will be able to live without recruiters.

When a role was advertised online, or I was called by a recruiter about an opportunity, I would search to see if the agent had an exclusive opportunity to fill the role, or was scraping LinkedIn for candidates for a low risk introduction fee. Soon roles started to cross over between recruiter listings and aggregated job boards. It was possible to not only find the same role listed by multiple recruiters, but also find an advert placed by the company looking to fill the role.

Today I found a role being sourced directly by the hiring manager, using LinkedIn. I don’t see any recruitment agencies advertising for the role. Albeit for specialist headhunting, LinkedIn is likely to replace the majority resourcing by connecting directly with those in the market.

L%*ckedIn — The social network you can’t afford to leave. As a contract digital designer and email developer, it has been clear to me for some years, that the best way to find short term contracts was either through twitter and eminently through LinkedIn. Recruitment agencies rarely needed or seemingly got around to listing fast moving contract roles on their websites. If you wanted to find a role, the best place was on LinkedIn. As your network balloons with recruiters, each of them aggressively expanding their network to contractors and hiring managers. As LinkedIn has developed to include learning resources and activity feed, it is inevitable that the activity of hiring managers liked by recruiters in my network is recommended as content to me. The circle is closing in.

Just as Google’s re-captcha is the human element is the input for machine learning. LinkedIn job search recommendations are far superior to the likes of Reed et al. It’s the human element, the seekers and searchers that set the likes of Google and LinkedIn apart. It continues the trend set by Amazon’s book recommendations. The team that used to make recommendations was outperformed by the engine built on its input.

Where does that leave recruiters? A short term solution may be to run separate accounts as a firewall between hiring managers and prospects to keep a separation between the two sides recruiters mediate between. But it is ultimately futile. LinkedIn will balance its revenue streams assuming its market share continues to increase.

Ultimately the writing is on the wall. Uber may have connected private hire drivers with the convenience of hail taxis, streamlining the process, but ultimately with companies like Google/Apple and Share Now (joint-venture of the BMW Group and Daimler AG) the aim is to remove the drivers and recruiters from the equation.

Where does that leave the rest of us?

With the last social network we would dare to leave. My father once said to me “It’s not what people say, it’s what they don’t say that is important.” — This is what I notice on the LinkedIn feed I look at every day during this 2020 covid era. Whilst the number of post of people announcing their redundancies has certainly increased, the majority of posts are corporate PR and ‘thought leaders’ surrounded by an echo chamber of recruiters and the financially secure.

“It’s not what people say, it’s what they don’t say that is important.”

I notice a distinct lack of dissent. It’s not that LinkedIn is a hostile environment, but it’s not lost on any of us, that LinkedIn is the place where we are most likely to secure our next job in a never ending, insecure gig economy. I remember a fellow marketing miner whom I communicated with from time to time commented out of place. It was in response to a post aimed at the youth of today, (18–40 even). The post said we didn’t work hard enough and were not prepared to suffer for long enough, that we expected progress in our careers and that we felt like our work should have value and meaning. She dared to say she disagreed.

She dared to say, when work is so often so poorly paid and diametrically opposed to experience, churn and living costs so high – of course we look for other opportunities. All that is left is knowledge and experience. Learning is earning. If you’re not earning and your not learning, it’s time to go.

She said what I didn’t dare to say. Now I see everywhere. The worst part is; in a world of AI and machine learning, making these kind of comments bring up tangible fears. If, like Facebook, people can be like for like profiled and selected for targeted advertising based on seemingly innocuous and aggregated meta-data. In the future, these kind of comments may affect employment opportunities.

As the last remaining long form social network, where is there left to go, and what do we get if we stay?