We're Helping College Students and Grads Get LinkedIn
One of my biggest frustrations with helping college students searching for internships and recent graduates hunting for entry level jobs is that many don't yet know how to network. It isn't that they're stupid or lazy. They simply haven't been taught. So how do you get a Gen Y'er who grew up with computers and can hardly remember a time when the Internet wasn't at their fingertips how to network? One way is to guide them to the best on-line tools and remind them to use those tools over and over again.
Today we added a new feature to CollegeRecruiter.com that will provide the students, recent graduates, and alumni who use CollegeRecruiter.com to help them find internships and entry level jobs with easy access to one of the best on-line networking tools: LinkedIn. Now when a job seeker applies to a job, they're taken to a page that shows the candidate who they know at the organization to which they applied and, perhaps even more importantly, who the candidate knows who knows people at the organization.
Instead of submitting a job application to XYZ Corporation and then hoping to hear back, candidates will now submit the job application and then instantly see who is in their network who works at that organization or knows someone who works at that organization. The idea is that the candidates will then contact those people and ask them to bring the application to the attention of a decision maker. The reality is that not all candidates will choose to make use of this great new tool. But those who do will find that their chances for success will skyrocket.
CollegeRecruiter.com is one of the first job boards and the first college job board to integrate LinkedIn's business networking tools. As a result of the integration, CollegeRecruiter.com users can utilize the LinkedIn network of more than 24 million users to find inside connections at employers who are advertising their job openings on CollegeRecruiter.com.
Where were tools like this when I was in college!
You're making a big assumption--that college students are even on LinkedIn. I've been teaching as an adjunct for the last couple of years, and less than 5% of my students have even heard of LinkedIn. Even if they've heard of it or are on it, most of them don't know how to use it, b/c LinkedIn does a terrible job of onramping people into getting the most use out of it. Career counselors are simply not teaching it. If they were, they'd all have thousands of connections because they'd be connected to all their former students.
I wrote an "Intro to LinkedIn" post on my personal blog that you might want to share with your readers...
http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/2006/12/getting_started.html
I send it out to my classes each year:
Charlie -- We share your frustation with the lack of penetration by LinkedIn amongst college students and, to a lesser extent, recent graduates. It is a great, great tool for those who use it but few college students and recent graduates know about it and fewer still have registered and fewer still have used it. But with efforts by people like you and organizations like CollegeRecruiter.com we can help change that. Also, if 500,000 job seekers use our site per month and even five percent use LinkedIn then we're still making it very, very easy for 25,000 job seekers to directly connect with people within the organizations for which they want to work.