Ever wished you could clone you star salesperson or your standout software developer? Genetic and robotic technology isn’t quite advanced enough yet, but LinkedIn claims it can give you the next best thing - finding potential hires who are veritable doppelgangers of your super staffer.
‘Countless recruiters told us hiring managers often say "I don’t know what my search criteria is, but this rockstar on my team is exactly what I’m looking for",’ Eduardo Vivas, LinkedIn’s head of talent solutions, wrote in a blogpost announcing the update of their ‘Recruiter’ tool, alongside a sorely-needed more mobile-friendly app for job hunters.
‘Now all you need to do is enter your rockstar employee’s name into the search field, select their profile, and LinkedIn Recruiter will automatically provide you with a list of similar members.’
He countered the obvious point that this could lead to identikit teams by saying recruiters could profiles of employees with diverse characteristics they wanted to find more of to track down ‘diversity candidates’ (a tokenistic phrase if we’ve ever heard one).
‘For example, recruiters can search for members who attended a predominantly Hispanic college, or belong to a LinkedIn Group for African-American software engineers,’ he told the FT.
So recruiters needn’t worry: LinkedIn, whose shares have tumbled 24% in the last six months on disappointing results, hasn’t developed a intelligent robot that will take their jobs just yet. This is just an enhanced search function that may make their lives easier.
But if recruiters really do want to track down another ‘rockstar’ they may be disappointed. Vivas assumes that what makes your top employee so special will be captured in their LinkedIn profile. Even with technology advancing at light speed we still haven’t figured out on how to capture that ‘je ne sais quoi’ on paper yet. You’ll still need to sift through a lot of grit before you find your golden nugget.
