Walking through the Glassdoor to LinkedIn

When I was in grad school and looking for jobs almost 15 years ago, the only real players in town were Dice.com and Monster. If you didn't have your resume in one or both of those websites, it was hard to get noticed by recruiters across the country. Fast forward to 2008 when social networks were all the rage and a new professional social network popped up on my radar. LinkedIn had been around for a few years but when I stumbled on it, it was a revelation. It looked cool, functional and most importantly professional. I signed up, put up my profile and promptly forgot all about it. At that time, I was comfortably ensconced in my job in the East Coast. Our company had done a big layoff and a bunch of folks had been affected but I had successfully survived and doing new things in a different role within the organization. But as soon as the news of the layoff hit the wires, recruiters from across the country were reaching out to me via LinkedIn. It was a remarkable experience seeing the instant attention. LinkedIn had arrived for me.LinkedInHiring in the Bay Area has been on an uptick for the past few years and two resources have become the lynchpin of the job searching/recruiting experience. LinkedIn and GlassDoor. LinkedIn offers a comprehensive set of tools for the recruiters to reach out to prospective candidates in ways that were never possible before. The Connection network was a gold mine waiting to be tapped. As the network has expanded, the potential pool of candidates has gone up many fold. For the prospective candidate, it has now become a must-have. A good professionally written up LinkedIn profile is the first step in getting the attention of a recruiter. Over the past few years, LinkedIn has been expanding its cache. With two important acquisitions, SlideShare and Pulse, LinkedIn is going in new directions. It is positioning itself not just as a professional connection network but also one that offers relevant articles and platforms for their voices to be heard.GlassdoorAround the same time that LinkedIn's user base was exploding, another San Francisco area startup was starting to fill in a missing niche in the job seeker market. Glassdoor offered candid and anonymous employee reviews of workplaces across the world. It also offered insights into salaries offered by the same employers. Professionals could sign up for an account and then post about their current and past workplaces in a way that was never possible in the past. Over the years, Glassdoor has become part of a job seeker checklist before accepting a job offer.Making a case for LinkedIn and Glassdoor to join forcesGiven that LinkedIn and Glassdoor are two of the more sophisticated and used job seeker/recruiter tools available in the market today, it makes one think- could they join forces to take the experience to a whole new level. Let us examine the pros and cons of one such marriage.WelcomeThere is a lot to like about a LinkedIn-Glassdoor marriage. LinkedIn offers a comprehensive set of tools for recruiters and has an ever growing paid recruiter base. It is also a must-be place for professionals so much so there are folks who have paid LinkedIn premium accounts now to give them greater control over their profile and how they engage with potential business contacts and possible future employers.Glassdoor has the employee angle covered very well and is looking to enhance its recruiter/employer friendly offerings. It has the obvious challenge of being appealing enough for employees to share their innermost thoughts about their employers while convincing employers to pay money to get insights. The trust challenge is a big one for Glassdoor.LinkedIn can offer employee side metrics gleaned from Glassdoor that could help both the recruiter and the recruited. The recruiter can make a pitch based on the reputation of the organization while the candidate gets much better visibility into the inner workings and employee perception of the company. LinkedIn can also offer a one stop shop for recruiters to build the reputation of the organization that would reflect in the kind of talent they are able to recruit.Pretty much most major corporations are now represented in LinkedIn. Glassdoor has a much smaller but growing footprint. The combined forces of the two can be a powerful case to make for every single company looking to hire good talent and for every professional to be noticed by the right employer or business contact.No EntryLinkedIn is all about sharing. It wants the member profile to serve as a public window into their professional self. And it hopes that it will attract the attention of a recruiter or a business contact to engage based on the profile. The more people are willing to share about their experience and expertise, the better the overall LinkedIn effectiveness.Glassdoor on the other hand is all about keeping things secret. If employees were to be found sharing their true opinions about their management and also their salaries, not only would it make things really bad for them, it would also open the doors for legal problems given that many companies explicitly call out that salary information not be shared. Trying to appeal to an employee to share while pitching paid packages to recruiters from the same company is a dichotomy that is hard to solve.Worth a try?There are definitely a lot of intriguing possibilities if LinkedIn and Glassdoor were to work together. The perception challenge will be the biggest by far but if the smart minds from the two companies can figure out a way to harness it, there are some interesting times ahead.And before I sign off, as a note of academic interest, LinkedIn ranks at the very top in employee satisfaction according to Glassdoor and Jeff Wiener is very highly regarded for his role as CEO at LinkedIn.