Recently Overheard InTake Call Exchange Between A Hiring Manager And HR Director:

HR Director:  “Are you on LinkedIn?”

Hiring Manager: (sheepishly) “No.”

HR Director:  “Good!  I don’t want anyone poaching you away!”

It was said in jest but you know what Winston Churchill said about jokes:

"A joke is a very serious thing."

I sit in on a lot of Intake Calls with a lot of Hiring Managers.  

I insist on it because I want to not only meet the Hiring Manager and hear how they think but I also want to ask specific questions about the job that the recruiters are sometimes hesitant to ask.

You know - the questions they think they should know the answers to.

I ask the dumb questions but in asking them I usually get the group loosened up and laughing.  

Once the guard is down and things aren't so formal people are more apt to say the things that are on their minds that they wouldn’t say if they didn’t feel somewhat safe in saying them.

One of the questions that many times does come up from one of the recruiters to the Hiring Manager is a bouncy and convivial, “Are you on LinkedIn?”

The response is many times a mixed bag of messages/here are just a few I’ve heard in the recent past:

“I don’t have much time for that.”

“My attorney advised me last year to take myself off it.”

“I signed up for that but I started getting so much crap mail from it I went in and turned everything off.  I’d take myself off the damned thing if I could figure out how.  Do you know how I can do that?”

“Uhhh…I think I signed up for that once.  Tell me again – what is it?”

“Yeah, I belong to it.  I use the groups.  I think it’s great.”

For every four to five negative comments from Hiring Managers I hear a positive one like the last one above but that’s about it.

I always hear the muffled, chagrined surprise to the negative responses from the recruiters in the mix – they don’t quite know what to make of it all as they all think LinkedIn is the greatest thing since sliced breads (who in the recruiting/sourcing community doesn’t?) but compare this to the public’s angry response in the comments section to this September 21, 2013 New York Times article reporting on the LinkedIn lawsuit being brought by four LinkedIn users “accusing the business-oriented social network of accessing their e-mail accounts without permission, harvesting the addresses of their contacts and spamming those people with repeated invitations to join the service.”

The worldwide perception of the networking behemoth is far different from the Lilliputian world many sourcers and recruiters live in with their myopic outlook on how the world works but be that as it is it seems to be dawning on some in the recruitersphere management that, as one recruiting pundit put it not long ago, “Your workforce is now under attack by every recruiter who now has the latest version of LinkedIn Recruiter."

Read that again.

“Your workforce is now under attack by every recruiter who now has the latest version of LinkedIn Recruiter."

If you think I’ve got it wrong here I’d love to hear why.

Don’t be afraid to say so, even ‘though Big Brother LinkedIn is watching.

“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”             ~Audre Lorde