1. You can change it to http://www.linkedin.com/in/JasonCalacanis. Just click My Profile --> Edit My Public Profile and the URL is the first option at the top.

Posted at 5:09PM on Dec 18th 2006 by Trekker

2. With regards to headhunters, those who are good at screening and finding the real top-quality candidates from all the respondents you'll get are the ones who will be worth the money.

Inotherwords, time = money and just because you can get 2000 people responding to a position ad doesn't mean you have the time or skill to find the perfect candidate from the group.

Just my thought.

Jared (one of the people who replied to your ad with some ideas)

Posted at 6:18PM on Dec 18th 2006 by Jared Spool

3. It's probably very few people who has that many people in their network at linkedin... And don't say it's over before it is - you haven't hired any of them yet, or have you?

Posted at 6:44PM on Dec 18th 2006 by Stefan Juhl

4. In regards to your Note 2, I found that I could edit my Public Profile URL on that page. So now my public profile is: http://www.linkedin.com/in/pmccarthy

Posted at 7:20PM on Dec 18th 2006 by Pat McCarthy

5. and even better your new employer, Sequoia funded them! hmmmmmm

Posted at 4:47AM on Dec 19th 2006 by RDV

6. Hey, Jason, nice post - I'd just add that my colleague Michael Copeland made a similar observation about LinkedIn being at a tipping point in his recent feature:

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2006/12/01/8394967/

Posted at 3:29PM on Dec 19th 2006 by Owen Thomas

7. yep, couldn't agree more jason.

while there are several LinkedIn features i think could still be added / improved (faces on profiles, a MUCH better groups function, APIs, to name a few), the core service is so valuable i use it almost every day.

the UI has always been a bit confusing for me, and altho better now i'd still say they could do with a lot more simplification. still, it's already an 8 or 9 out of 10 in my book.

as to the headhunter question -- one thing i notice these days is that i've taken on a good bit of the recruiting function for many of the startups i work with. and the few headhunters / PR folks i do tend to trust are the ones who are also long-time LinkedIn users.

- dave mcclure
http://www.linkedin.com/in/davemcclure

Posted at 5:36PM on Dec 19th 2006 by Dave McClure

8. great post, I don't think that we'll see a huge change in traditional recruiting yet as we are just at the tip of the iceberg with social networking (as far as it is used professionally) - I'm not saying it isn't big, or cool, but I think there's a lot more to come.

Here's my list of things that are missing:

http://www.jibberjobber.com/blog/archives/209

Posted at 10:41AM on Dec 20th 2006 by Jason Alba

9. I wasn't too sure about the value of LinkIn until I got a job through it.

Posted at 12:00PM on Dec 20th 2006 by Rational Beaver

10. Why Is LinkedIn So Valuable?

You and other Bloggers seem suprised at the valuation of 250M for LinkedIn.

I am not surprised at all.

Lets do some of the math.
If you are placing a 75K employee.
How much is LinkedIn worth to you? A 1,000 seems reasonable and lets say you land 5 placements a year.
That means you are willing to spend 5000 a year on Linkedin.

Lets say there are 10,000 headhunters/companies willing to do that.

Therefore 10,000 x 5,000 = 50,000,000 in annual revenue and thats just the placement market.

Most Bloggers only focus on one small part of the value of LinkedIn.

In their post Stefan and Cory speak about the cool aspects of LinkedIn and focus on the Job hunting.

While I am always happy to hear that people have discovered the value of LinkedIn. I am surprised at the limitations they put on it.

The finding a job part of LinkedIn is one of the things that make it useful which is what Stefan and Cory focused on.

But, if you are not looking for a job - then why bother with LinkedIn?

Here are just some of my thoughts on why LinkedIn is useful.

1. If you are looking to sell a product - LinkedIn provides you a whole ton of potential contacts. Their profile tells you what they think is important and why. Therefore, if you a good sales person - you can prepare a good presentation tailored to the clients needs.
2. If you are looking to sell a company - you can identify a whole number of potential merger or purchase partners.
3. For example, I have a manufacturing client who wishes to sell his business here in Ontario and now I am discussing a purchase with people located in China and the United States.
4. If you are looking to hire somebody - you have a whole description of who they are are and what they think.
5. If you are looking to solve a problem - LinkedIn provides a very detailed description of potential people you can contact to discuss the problem. Sort of Napoleon Hill?s mastermind on steroids.
6. If you are moving to a new city - there are a whole ton of people who have said - come and meet me. What a wonderful way to start a new move. I was asked by a fellow in California if I would introduce him to my contacts in Dallas. I said yes of course.
7. If you want to export/import a product - LinkedIn provides you contacts all around the world. For example - somebody contacted me about exporting carpets from the Ukraine into Canada.
8. If you are looking to hire somebody - LinkedIn provides you a list of contacts who may know other contacts to start your search. For example - I was able to help a fellow in England find a CFO located in Israel for a company owned in the US.

I think this gives you just a smattering of what LinkedIn could be used for.

And these are just the things I have discovered.

Take Care

Zale

zaletabakman.ca

Posted at 3:07PM on Dec 22nd 2006 by Zale Tabakman

11. Thanks for telling this story, Jason. A few comments:

1) It's true that the bigger LinkedIn gets, the more valuable participating in it becomes, because not only can you reach more people, but more of the holes in the social network are filled and it becomes easier to reach the people you want to via fewer degrees of separation.

However, that doesn't mean that LinkedIn is suddenly hit the tipping point of becoming valuable where it wasn't before. Your experience is not necessarily typical. If it were, I have a hard time imagining the company growing to its current 9 million or so members. Many of us have been achieving this kind of value from LinkedIn for a long time.

2) Regarding contacting all 2,000 connections in a single click... that would certainly be technologically simple, but I fear, and I imagine Reid does too, that it would be just too tempting and that people would just start using it as a spam vehicle. Even with the current limitation, it still happens some. It would be far worse if the process were made too easy for everyone. Think about it -- 10 minutes was a lot faster than the alternatives. How quickly could you pick those same 2,000 people out of your e-mail client or contact manager?

I do think there's a solution, but it's not as simple as just flipping the switch. I think there needs to be some sort of "member in good standing" metric, perhaps hidden from public view, based on the person's behavior and feedback or complaints form other people. I know they already have a system somewhat like this in place regarding invitations, so the code is there somewhere -- just needs to be applied to this particular problem.

Finally, I agree with you about headhunters, to a point. At the moment, they're loving it, because it's saving them huge amounts of time in sourcing and a lot of busy hiring managers are still willing to outsource the entire process. As with any kind of disintermediation, though, just because something is available as do-it-yourself doesn't mean that everyone's going to adopt it quickly.

I think it will certainly head in that direction, and when it does, recruiters will have to redefine their role. I predict that you'll see them move closer and closer to the hiring company, doing that next level of screening (what's it going to take you to go through those fifty and narrow it down to a short list to interview?). Forward-thinking recruiters are already preparing for that, but I don't think the rest of them need to start brushing up their own resumes just yet.

Posted at 1:58AM on Dec 23rd 2006 by Scott Allen

12. Oh, and I'm sure you've probably already gotten it figured out, but just in case, or if anyone else reading this can benefit from it, I've got a step-by-step tutorial, with pictures, on how to make your LinkedIn profile public and set the URL on it:

Making Your LinkedIn Profile Public

Posted at 1:58AM on Dec 23rd 2006 by Scott Allen

13. Er, make that:

http://linkedintelligence.com/making-your-linkedin-profile-public

(I tried to code an <a href="">)

Posted at 2:00AM on Dec 23rd 2006 by Scott Allen

14. Actually, it is simple math - but Jason, you're wrong on this one. I understand the impulse though.

In network theory the reason you want everyone on the same platfom, is so you are not limited to the people you know. Your circle and their circle is a tired resource to tap. If we were that great at pre-filtering, the value of nodes wouldn't be exponential.

In your post I actually saw the "not" (I think you meant note - I don't spell well either)... and got excited that they had an option to exclude everyone in your circles and pay $150 to touch everyone else. In junk mail they call it, raping the house list.

In number theory, the same mistake occurs going the other way... we assume there is an infinite amount of choice and impossible amount of data... there isn't.

It sucks that we have to watch one blogger give a "hat tip" to another blogger for "first" finding something written about a PRNewswire drop on a patent that was filed in a patentDB a year ago. It might be the state of things. But it sucks.

There is a limited amount of music, news, even "facts" - the pros get paid to write it, make it, (ahem... teach it) - an everything else is a cacophony of crap...

None of MP3's bands got signed. Firefly worked, but there really weren't that many suggestions we liked - we didn't know about already. There is a long tail - but it's long by comparison to a VERY short shelf of sku's a Wal-Mart.

Think of it this way, I thought you poaching Digg was nice smart fun move - but just a step down the path to right. It's a sad state that with only about 40K real stories a day - whole media empires can be daydreamed about, built on the premise we need rank amatuers to give it context. If it is ever to be an empire - paying real salaries, the real writers will come take the jobs.

We aren't actually hearing anyone say (or saying ourselves) we need more than 40K real articles though.

When Google or Linked In does it's real job - you'll actually know you are telling the entire knowable universe of potential candidates. And right then, we'll fear hiring from right within our circle - when our infomation is truly frictionless, we lose the much of the excuse for bad decisions.

Said another way, Google's vulnerable as long as the search engine where I have to "sit and think" about the words to search for... is also on purpose giving me results they know I don't want, but they got paid to lie and tell me I might also want.

Yes, well it was that easy to be bigger than Yahoo overnight. Google is still just a dumb hoover... We got a long way to go. Think big. Any kid with Ruby Ajax et al can make a word processor. IPOD is a horrible little market.

When technology is amatuer's advantage, the gains are in shortening the time it takes to get the tech in the hands of the talent.

Congrats and Be Safe,

Morgan

Posted at 2:35PM on Dec 24th 2006 by Morgan W

15. Good points.

My .02

As both a headhunter and site developer, I can say that Linked-In is a good tool for contacting Senior Level people. Where it fails, in my opinion, is a lack of tools and a 1.0 user interface just like every other "profile site". Most Senior execs I know have few connections to anyone except their direct reports which can get into the hundreds if you are CIO of a top company--what good is that? Another point, Many of my connections are consultants (I am a consultant myself) who tend to job-hop (not the people you really want to invest in for perm roles).

I am working on a site (investors welcome to email me for info) to compete with Linked-In, Monster, MySpace etc. so I can't jeopardize my project by going into the features, but I think every job site leaves everything cutting-edge to be desired, and the new generation will have little interest in the traditional job search, the traditional company, or the traditional way of working--sites need to get away from being so transaction based and start focusing on maximizing the individuals potential. If you apply for a job, that's usually what you get-- a job. If both company and candidate take the time to think critically, they can maximize an opportunity instead of just filling a hole.


Re Headhunting: If you think all there is to Headhunting is getting some resumes and some names, you're sorely mistaken or you've got better Irish luck than I do. Some headhunters who are non-technical or unwilling to expend the bandwidth doing deep behavioral and technical interviews have this more is better philosophy too, and they just throw resumes at hiring managers who don't know any better. I can size up 15 candidates with identical resumes and rank them based on environment fit, comm skills, knowledge of tech, approach to volatile situations and problem-solving ability if I have a 30 minutes to interview them face to face--can a hiring manager spend that time without hurting the business? I venture to say no. It doesn't matter where you worked, where you went to school etc. It's how passionate and knowledgable you are about your career and if you can deliver--that is ALL that matters. Unless you are a technical manager unlike anyone I've ever met, you'll be hard-pressed to do this yourself with any degree of success unless you are hiring robots, and you'll find yourself having a) high turnover or b) unproductivity in your team. For the amount you've saved a headhunting fee, your SDLC will be fubar and you'll still need a new hire in 90 days. There is more to hiring than hiring your friends, your friends friends, or looking at pieces of paper, just like there's more to being web 2.0 than having a bunch of useless connections to people you'll never collaborate with.

And on that note, I know alot of brilliant people on linked-in who I would not want to work with and they have dozens of references from people who say things like, "bad apple, never want to work him again", if you ask them off the record.

Be careful.
Hire well.

++ Ryan

All in all, I like Linked-In and I'll continue to use it, but it leaves alot to be desired.

Posted at 4:01PM on Dec 27th 2006 by Ryan Brogan

16. As others have pointed out, the reason a headhunter might be worth thousands of dollars is the same reason we buy the New York Times, even though most of that information is in the raw AP feed: filtering. If it takes on average 20 minutes for you to consider your 50 hits (and that's low, considering you also have to process the 2000 "how you doing!" emails) you've invested, you've put in 15 hours. How much is it worth to have 10 really good candidates instead?
As with news, good software will reduce the need for human filters. I just don't think we are there yet.

Posted at 8:57AM on Feb 8th 2007 by Paul

17. One of the things I've been wanting to do for quite some time is build a resource that I could use to communicate the real business benefits of LinkedIn to potential new members - people I want to invite or have invited. This same resource could be used as an effective response to the nay-sayers (especially in the blogosphere) who don't get the value of LinkedIn either.

Well, that's clearly too big a task for one person (and how credible would it really be anyway?). So, I made it a group effort. Today, I announced a group blogging project on "smart ways to use LinkedIn":

http://linkedintelligence.com/smart-ways-to-use-linkedin-a-group-blogging-project

Hope you'll consider participating.

Posted at 11:43PM on May 1st 2007 by Scott Allen