Jonathan Duarte is the Founder and CEO of one of the first Internet job boards, GOJobs.com, I've had the unique opportunity of being a part of Internet recruiting and the Internet Job Search process from both the employer and job seeker's perspective. As a result, my insights and expertise are quite unique.
Some of my recent projects include: Mastering Linked LinkedIn Video TrainingProfile Launch Pad - LinkedIn Profile Optimization
I get a lot of email and spam from my LinkedIn connections.
Unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn’t seem to do much about spam. I really wish they would. At least that would control the spam that I get from within LinkedIn.
Today, though, I got an email from one of my first degree connections.
It was sent directly to my LinkedIn email address (I maintain a separate email address for all LinkedIn connections, so I know where the email is coming from, and if it’s from LinkedIn Spam, etc.).
This was one of the weirdest emails I have ever seen from a LinkedIn connection.
It was so strange, and just wrong, that I just can’t imagine what was going on in the writers head.
In a recent announcement, Yahoo CEO, Marrissa Mayer, decided that it’s time to end “The Yahoo 4 hour Work Week!”.
From my personal experience, Yahoo has been living the “4 hour work week” with a culture of non-accountability.
Several years ago, I was working on a job advertising partnership with Yahoo.
No one on the Yahoo team would make a decision.
No one was ever “available” to make a decision.
Then, someone would come back to the table and say, OK, we have approval.
We would draft the documents and send them to their legal team.
The document was only 5 pages, mostly boilerplate stuff, but it would take several more weeks. I later learned that the “legal department” was actually outsourced to a big firm, and since their was no accountability on the part of the entire Yahoo team, the legal team just kept billing, billing, and billing.
Of course, the document that we sent to get reviewed was returned with notes saying that Yahoo could not agree to those terms, and so we would do it again.
After three attempts at working through this complete incompetence, I finally got the Yahoo “authority” on the phone, and told them to find someone else’s time to waste. (The actual text was more like “go blank yourselves and get a real job”.)
So, after hearing the news that Marrissa was going to put an end to the “4 Hour Work Week” culture at Yahoo, I knew exactly what she going after… the lack of accountability.
Good for Marrissa! Good for Yahoo!
Flexible time for employees is a great benefit. Many responsible employees can, and do work better remotely. However, Yahoo is in a position where they need all-hands-on-deck. They need a culture change.
The employees who are committed to turning Yahoo around will stay and weather the culture change that has to happen. The rest… well they’ll be posting their resume on Monster. (Does Monster even exist anymore? Oh.. that’s another story.)
This is a fantastic list of things you can do to Add Value to your professional network, meanwhile increasing the number of visitors to your profile.
If you’re using LinkedIn to build your Personal Brand, get noticed by employers and recruiters, or building your professional network, take note… these simple tips work.
In fact, for the last 6 weeks, I’ve been running a LinkedIn social media marketing campaign, based solely on sharing relevant and excellent quality articles, similar to what Andy was mentioning.
I have a large LinkedIn network (14,000+ 1st degree connections), so I wanted to see if I could “Activate” it through Updates on my personal profile, and in highly targeted LinkedIn Groups.
Here’s what I have been doing, and my results:
Between Thanksgiving and New Years, I started getting more involved with sending updates through my LinkedIn Account.
Then, with the first week of the new year in play, and thousands of people “restarting” their New Years resolutions and “job searches”, I committed to actively updating my LinkedIn profile. At first, I wasn’t doing it very often, only a couple times per week, but as I got into the rhythm, I was able to post more updates on a daily basis.
The results are amazing: LinkedIn Profile Views
In a few short weeks, from less than a couple hours of actual content curation and writing my own blog posts, I was able to increase the number of viewers to my LinkedIn Profile, by over 500%, in less than 6 weeks.
When I started, I was averaging about 4 views per day to my LinkedIn Profile.
The first 4 weeks were pretty slow, as I wasn’t doing it consistently, and I wasn’t really putting much effort into an organized campaign. Additionally, it was between Thanksgiving and New Years, when pretty much nothing happens in the Job Search, Career, and Recruiting markets.
Then, once I got a system in place that allowed me to update several times throughout the day, without continually interrupting my normal daily workflow, things started to change dramatically.
On week 5, between Christmas and New Years, I started sending about 2 updates per day, on average.
I would seek out timely, and quality job search articles, career advice blog posts, LinkedIn How-to advice, Youtube videos, recruiting and human resources news, and general business news.
I also wrote two of my own blog posts, and posted them in multiple LinkedIn Groups, as well as posted links to the blog posts on my profile.
On week 6, I increased the number of daily updates to 3-5 updates per day.
The results show a 500% increase in Profile Views in just 6 weeks, most of which time was spent learning and testing, and not updating.
My profile went from 4.25 avg views per day to about 22 views per day, and climbing.
So, do updates help?
I would say absolutely.
Updates certainly get you attention.
The question is do the updates have a direct impact on your brand and blog and social authority.
I would say yes to each of these questions.
LinkedIn is by far the biggest driver of traffic to the GO Jobs Career Blog, with 77% of traffic coming from LinkedIn. As my topics and articles were of a professional nature, this makes perfect sense.
Facebook and Twitter are only marginal sources of traffic, yet I share the same links. Facebook and Twitter are also have different social cultures to them. At this time, I don’t want to blast all my ‚Äújob search‚Äù and ‚Äúrecruiting‚Äù topics to my friends a family who are connected to me on Facebook, so I didn’t share much of this content on Facebook. I am however starting a Jonathan Duarte facebook page, where I will add this content though.
When I post an article on the Career Blog. I also share the url across multiple social media networks, including;
my personal Twitter account @JonathanDuarte, with 4,500 followers,
While this is just one, isolated, social marketing test, I know that I found a formula to grow an audience with a network of users who are taking action… the key ingredients in a successful social marketing plan.
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As a pioneer in the Internet Recruting and Internet Job Search industry, I’ve always lived and worked under the “Monster Cloud”. Monster has always been a big force in the industry, until the last 5 years.
Personally, I think founders bring a lot of focus and vision to a company. When they leave, a lot of that time, their vision leaves with them.
Think of Apple without Steve Jobs… (the thought of the Skully years… comes to mind.. well now too.)
Microsoft without Bill Gates…
Oracle without Larry Ellison, or
Starbucks without Howard Schultz?
Amazon without Jeff Bezos?
LinkedIn without Reid Hoffman
and of course, Facebook without Mark Zuckerberg.
That’s how I think of Monster without Jeff Taylor.
Taylor orchestrated the early years of Monster. He helped define Monster, and Internet Recruitment. He “crossed-the chasm” with Monster and brought Internet Recruiting into its existence.
The vision grew, and then was backed by bigger money, went public and continued to grow and scale up. The disruption of the “Print Classifieds” and transformation to “Internet Recruiting” was based on the single premise of creating a central portal to post your resume where employers could find you, and you could find employers with job openings.
Once the disruption was complete, the bean counters and Wall Street took over. Corporate money came in and innovation went out. Jeff left. That was August of 2005, and Monster has been slowly dying from that day forward.
Innovation was no longer a part of the corporate culture.
Instead, innovation became a line on the Balance Sheet, outsourced or purchased.
Without a vision, Market penetration and revenue became the game.
Monster went on to try to innovate through “acquisition”, which is a very difficult when it comes to your core company vision and technology.
That lead to several highly funded Venture startups whose sole exist strategy was “buyout-by -Monster” and other strange acquisitions.
* Tickle, an early social media site, $100 million, by Rick Marini, now Founder and CEO of Highly-funded, Branchout
* HotJobs, purchased from Yahoo, $245 Million, (essentially job seeker and client acquisition purchase)
* FlipDog, technology acquisition
* AffintyLabs, Social Networking platform, $61 Million
* Trovix, a Search Technology company, purchased in 2008, for $72.5 Million.
Some of the acquisitions made perfect sense.
Integrating these technologies into the Monster Brand, again, without a vision and real leadership, became almost impossible. Trovix, for example had great semantic search technology, that Monster purchaed in 2008. It took over 4 years for Monster to integrate the semantic technology they purchased into their core product. Monster’s 6Sense‚Ñ¢, was finally launched in 2012.
By then, Monster executives were hanging out on Long Island going over the “Next Deal”, while a little company in Mountain View, with an idea, passion, a great set of founders, and access to money, was working away at the next disruption… LinkedIn.com.
While I have only met Jeff one time, from what I know about the early days, Jeff was definitely a character. You might have loved him or hated him, but he did have a presence and he built a highly successful company out of that energy.
Monster may not have always been out front on a lot of technologies, but they have adopted and continued to use their big international presence to continue to push the envelope of Internet Recruiting.
Unfortunately, I think a lot of people in New York are learning that Innovation isn’t something that can be purchased.
Innovation created and killed Monster, nothing else.
Just my $.02.
What do you think?
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I just finished reading 
The once 800 pound Gorilla in the Internet Job Search Market, Monster.com, is slowly coming to the end of it’s life. 