Things I'd like to see in LinkedIn
These are not necessarily my ideas (and in most cases I've heard other people ask for similar, if not identical, functionality), but rather the items that
I would find very helpful in my daily use of the site.
- Joe, meet Bob. Bob, meet Joe.
- It would be really nice to be able to use LinkedIn to introduce
two of my contacts to each other. This is such a big part of
real-world networking that it is actually kind of amazing that they
haven't already implemented it.
- Reference Checking for Potential Employees
- A variation on the idea above is for use with reference
checking. In traditional hiring, the soon-to-be-hired candidate
provides a short list of people they have lined up to act as
professional and/or character references. It would be handy to have
this list tagged somehow within LinkedIn so that the candidate could
"introduce" a hiring manager to the reference list and they could
choose who to contact (without needing an introduction - ideally
"introducing" them would allow them to see an email address and/or
phone number).
- Reference Checking for Hiring Managers
- From the hiring manager's perspective, getting a list of
references from the potential employee has limited utility, as they
will undoubtably all be positive. It would be helpful to be able
to automatically generate a list of possible references based on a
person's work history. This can be done manually now, by creating
separate searches for each former employer and then winnowing those
down by employment date, but that's a real pain in the butt. All the
data is there, so it would be relatively easy to build a query that
would do all of that automatically and just return a prioritized list
of contacts. In terms of priority, I would want it sorted first by
degrees away from me (assuming I'm the hiring manager) and then by
date, although it would also be interesting to give higher priority to
positions of higher stature or longer tenure.
- Personalized Search Settings
- I don't like the default search order of "keyword relevance".
I'd much rather sort by "degrees away from you". It would be nice to
be able to set this as a user preference so I don't have to change
it every time. I plan on writing a GreaseMonkey script to do it for
me, but haven't gotten around to it yet. There are probably other
settings that would be handy to personalize, as well - this is just
the one I have to change very frequently.
- Advanced Search should not require a page request
- I use the Advanced Search form frequently (mostly because I
usually search by a person's name and want to sort by "degrees away
from you" rather than "keyword relevance"). It'd be quicker if
the form was in a hidden div that the link would open rather than
going to a separate page. Another GreaseMonkey script to add to the
list...
- Manual Ordering of Recommendations
- I'd like to be able to manually order the recommendations I've
received rather than having them forced to latest first. Not only are
some recommendations "better" (more complimentary, more relevant,
better written, from a closer relationship, etc), but I'd like to be
able to group them (bosses, peers, subordinates, partners, etc).
- Sorting Results by Number of Recommendations
- Early on it was very useful to sort search results by number of
links. Now that most of us have "open networkers" in our network
somewhere, the number of links is pretty useless. For many types of
searches it would be useful to sort by the number of recommendations
received. Sorting by the number of recommendations sent might also be
useful for some things, but usually I'm more interested in candidates
or potential partners that have more recommendations.
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