The IPO of professional social network LinkedIn is probably the most significant web stock issue since Google, so I wanted to take a moment to reflect on LinkedIn’s impact on the world of work. Though ostensibly a general-purpose social networking tool for professionals, and nowhere near as big as Facebook in terms of number of users (LinkedIn has some 100 million users, compared with over 500 million on Facebook), LinkedIn has become an important tool for connecting job seekers and employers, notably introducing several key innovations that repositioned the standard social network profile as a kind of “digital resume,” complete with features with which a user can showcase their skills and demonstrate their professional reputation.

A Digital Resume

Like other social networking apps, LinkedIn enables its users to build a profile and connect with other users. Where LinkedIn differs from its competition is that it defines a users’ profile in terms of their work history, rather than other personal details. At its most basic, it’s simply an online version of the traditional printed resume, listing a users’ work history and academic qualifications. However, coupled with LinkedIn’s reputation tools the profile becomes much more powerful, giving employers much more insight into the capabilities of a particular candidate — an attractive proposition for both employers and job seekers.

A Way to Demonstrate Reputation

LinkedIn introduced two key social network profile reputation innovations: Recommendations and LinkedIn Answers. Recommendations allows users to post endorsements from people they’re worked with on their profiles, which are then associated with the particular job the recommendation is for; they’re like an online version of the traditional reference. Despite concerns that the Recommendations system can be gamed — users offering to give each other fake recommendations to bolster their profile, for example — it does provide a way for employers to screen candidates. Employers using LinkedIn Jobs can even limit applications to users with a certain number of Recommendations.

LinkedIn Answers provides a way for users to demonstrate their expertise by answering business questions posted by the community. These answers are then added to the users profile, enabling users to showcase their knowledge and providing potential employers or business partners with more information about a potential candidate.

Recommendations and Answers are complementary: While Recommendations can be used to assess what a particular user is like to work with, Answers is a way to assess a user’s knowledge.

The Future

While LinkedIn would probably like to be more than just a Web 2.0 job board, those functions drive a significant portion of its income, so it needs to make sure that its digital resume stays relevant. While a LinkedIn profile was once the best way for people to showcase their skills and experience online  there are now many more ways to measure a person’s digital reputation — Klout score, Odesk and Elance reviews, and Quora answers, for example — which arguably could be even more valid; LinkedIn will need to make sure it doesn’t get overtaken by these newer services.

Additionally, with an increasing number of freelancers in the work market, LinkedIn needs to cater to them specifically. Currently, LinkedIn’s Jobs section is heavily skewed towards traditional employment, while its Answers section is seemingly mainly inhabited by consultants and freelancers. It should reconcile this disconnect by providing a way for freelancers and consultants to find employment though the service, perhaps by modifying its existing Jobs section, or perhaps by integrating an Elance-like freelance jobs marketplace.

As Stacey noted when the IPO was filed, the funds raised should enable the company to make some savvy acquisitions to round out its business offering, perhaps even including acquiring some companies that currently provide services to freelancers, or reputation-based services. Whether those purchases and its own innovations will keep it ahead of competition like Facebook, the newer reputation-based start-ups, and even the traditional job boards like Monster.com, remains to be seen.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Coletivo Mambembe

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What has always been so interesting to me, is listening to the stories of people who are middle-aged and older, discuss how they have achieved their success. It never fails that there was always some choice tidbit that I would part away with. At present, I am not part of those middle-aged persons whom I fondly listened to and as I look back on the years I realized that I have a lot of things to share than can be of help to those who are still beginning their careers and building their resume in the entertainment business. You aspirations or the positions you intend to fill don’t really matter and this is true for everyone else. I call it the “showing up” theory. It is not hard to do and it’s effective most of the time.

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By Andrew Liszewski

Like it or not, job hunting is a competition, and every little advantage you can find puts you one step closer to landing the career of your dreams. So when Ramiro Pareja Veredas decided he wanted to leave the IT world behind and pursue a career in electrical engineering, he realized that a business card that actually demonstrated his skills would go a lot further than just a resume printed on nice paper stock. So he created this card that’s made from an actual PCB board with working electronic bits.

Besides his etched contact info, the card also features a couple of breakaway corners turning it into a USB flash drive when connected to a PC. Now the 24KB of onboard memory is of course extremely limited, but it’s enough to hold a copy of his resume and a cover letter, or small apps that turn the card into an oscilloscope, a datalogger or a PIC trainer. Now when produced in small batches like Ramiro’s been doing the cards cost about 5 euros a piece, but if it leads to employment it’s a minimal investment given the long term benefits.

[ T4F - Introduction to my Business Card ] VIA [ Make ]