Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
The LinkedIn ProFinder
It’s June 2016 and I have now used LinkedIn Profinder for about 2 months, it's timeto recap the experience and share my feelings about the service and its potential.
Especially in my native Finland, where the job market is in serious re-structuringphase, ProFinder can significantly speed up the change from traditionalemployment towards more freelance work, temporary assignments, and how smallspecialist B2B-companies sell their services.
LinkedIn wants to change the way how people commercialize their skills, whether itis as traditional job seekers, freelancers or the way they sell their specialism asemployees of a small company. And just with its great mass - 433 million users - itcan create some serious waves in how these skills find new home.
The LinkedIn Profinder
You could just as well describe ProFinder as a tendering platform, but its main purpose is toconnect people with skills to those looking for those skills, without having to hire someonepermanently. And the one looking for the skills doesn't have to be HR or recruitmentpersonnel, but anyone in the company who's got the ranks and budget to buy the service -project managers, financial directors, team leaders, CTOs, etc.
If you have a need, you can easily open a project to ProFinder and start waiting forproposals from suitable, interested parties. LinkedIn isn't really inventing anything totallynew here, but provides a platform that's easy to use, simple, and which in their existinguserbase can create some significant added value, which makes me wonder why haven'tthey done something like this earlier? The setup clearly competes with service like Elanceor Freelancermap, even 99designs in some use cases.
The LinkedIn Profinder
You could just as well describe ProFinder as a tendering platform, but its main purpose is toconnect people with skills to those looking for those skills, without having to hire someonepermanently. And the one looking for the skills doesn't have to be HR or recruitmentpersonnel, but anyone in the company who's got the ranks and budget to buy the service -project managers, financial directors, team leaders, CTOs, etc. If you have a need, you caneasily open a project to ProFinder and start waiting for proposals from suitable, interestedparties. LinkedIn isn't really inventing anything totally new here, but provides a platformthat's easy to use, simple, and which in their existing userbase can create some significantadded value, which makes me wonder why haven't they done something like this earlier?The setup clearly competes with service like Elance or Freelancermap, even 99designs insome use cases.
ProFinder is set up intuitively, guiding the user to the right direction. The set up is simple,with clear structure and taking into account very different needs, project criteria andrequirements to understanding the need and tendering for the need.
Skills you’re looking for
In ProFinder you can start drafting the requirement by setting keywords yourself or by choosing one of many predefined categories LinkedIn has provided. Depending on the category, LinkedIn provides a project form that guides you to fill out all necessary information for others to tender for the project.
Predefined categories
Create a project
The form is constructed of 10-15 questions relating to the company, the project, the skills, and the setup to successfully perform the required tasks, such as duration of the project, location, need to sit at client premises, etc.
Tailored project form for different skills, predefined project criterias to fill out
You can find your own projects at My Projects –section
You can find all open requests at Client Requests –section
"Client Requests" section lists all available projects. Here you can open the projects, check out the project descriptions, skillsets, and all other information available - and finally decide to send a proposal. So far all the projects listed have to be in the U.S., International projects are not made available yet.
At the end the project description you can decide to send a proposal by yourself or for your employer.
Settings are simple. Notice the Account-section’s direct link to your ProFinder profile.It’s a different address and slightly different layout to your standard public LinkedIn profile view.
The Settings are extremely simple. The most important parts being the Services-section, which lists the services you are offering here, and which will be displayed clearly in your LinkedIn Profinder profile, which is slightly different to your public LinkedIn profile.
Your LinkedIn ProFinder profile link can be found at the Settings-
section under "Account".
LinkedIn Profinderprofile looks a bit different to standard public view to your
LinkedIn profile.
Comparing the "traditional" LinkedIn profile and the LinkedIn ProFinder profile, the differences
are in the structure how your skills are displayed.
Here you can see Steve Rabin's LinkedIn profile and ProFinder profile side-by-side. The differences are quite clear. ProFinder profile focuses on person's Recommendations, Summary and offered Services, followed by list of mutual connections, all public recommendations, and then the traditional structure with Posts, Experience, Education... And at the very top a possibility to directly ask for a proposal if the profile is interesting enough.
ProFinder is clearly focused on freelancers, micro-companies, and small companies selling professional services. Itdoesn't mean that global bluechips wouldn't use the service, but they would hardly sell their own services inProFinder, rather use it to buy the services. So it's a kind of a subcontracting platform for many, but time will onlytell the variety of use cases it's suitable for.
Like always, LinkedIn has so far limited the access to only U.S. based users, and even in the States people have toapply access to ProFinder. Europe will most likely be next in line, often getting access to new services and featureswith roughly 6 months delay. So we could expect the service to start rolling out in Europe by the end of 2016, butthere's no clear date or criteria when the service will be made available. LinkedIn usually tests the new featureswith a limited number of active American users, then expands to a larger crowd if there are no significant bugs,possibly makes necessary changes or improvements, and again expands the userbase bit by bit, until it's ready tobe rolled out globally. Even then not all users get access all at once, but LinkedIn rolls out new features slowly butsurely. And because of this way of working, people around the world have slightly different versions of LinkedInbased on the feature set made available at that certain point of time in their location.
That’s the brief look into LinkedIn ProFinder. I’m sure the service will change and develop now
that it’s finally been published to first group of actual users. Only time will tell which
direction it will take, so stay tuned!
We train corporations and other organisations across Europe, Russia, Ukraine, Middle East and
soon starting trainings in Asia and Africa to use social media effectively.
Ask for more info at
Tom Laine
http://www.linkedin.com/in/tomlaine
Mob. +358 400 296 196
