The Wrap #10: From promise to pompous
It's time for a rant. I'm starting to feel like LinkedIn is falling into the same trap as the other early social networks. Do you remember the early days of Facebook? I do. Facebook came out while I was in college and it was limited to whatever university you attended. Then in 2006, they opened up the platform to anyone who wanted to create a profile. You instantly had a way to connect with the people in your life - family, friends, neighbors, and classmates you'd lost touch with to share what was going on in your life. Twitter followed soon after and gave you a way to connect with anyone in the world. If I was at a conference, I could connect with other attendees through Twitter and meet them in person. LinkedIn followed and promised a living resume that connected you to coworkers and similar folks in your industry. This all was great for taking the physical connections you have in life and providing a way to connect with them anywhere and anytime.
Yet, as we check in on the social media leaders almost 20 years later, how are they doing?
They have all deteriorated into withered husks of their former selves. Facebook has become a wasteland of angry political views, misinformation, and former classmates trying to sell you on their latest pyramid scheme.
Twitter? Even before Elon took over it was a sea of nonsense, forever ruined by politics, bots, and misinformation.
LinkedIn was (and still is) a great way to show the actual human behind the resume. I love that I have multiple ways of connecting with business people and showcasing my past work accomplishments and writing. Yet I find myself scrolling through my feed and rolling my eyes at the amount of hot garbage being shared. There is too many people trying to become the next Steve Jobs or Simon Sinek by posting fortune-cookie-ish pearls of wisdom from a Mad Libs list of business buzzwords or trying to "go viral" with virtue signaling and humblebragging.
For example, I've bet you've seen posts like this one:
If that example didn't upset your stomach, there is an entire channel on Reddit dedicated to LinkedIn Lunatics.
So how did we get from promise to pompous? I think a big part of it is that people figured out how to game the algorithm. They realized that there was a recipe for "going viral." Like any good baker, they simply needed to follow the directions. More and more people caught on to this recipe and we're stuck with long drawn out stories told one line at a time with a twist about empowerment or grit with hashtags like #embracethegrind that belong etched on a pillow and sold on Etsy.
When everything is the same, nothing stands out anymore. We're just adding to the noise in an echo chamber. We've gotten to the point where the system is gamed enough that we've lost what really makes us different, our authenticity.
I'll put on my HR Tech Lorax hat for another week to warn you that I'm afraid this will happen to TA. When candidates know how to game the AI and optimize their resume to a job description, how will hiring managers know which candidates have real, authentic skills or just know how to play the game? I imagine they get as overwhelmed as I do when I look at a job posting on LinkedIn only to see that there have been 3,000 applicants. Once you get to that point, why even bother?
On to this week's HR Tech news. This week's Wrap features highlights from GoodTime, Cornerstone OnDemand, Salesforce, RecFest, and what the movie Multiplicity can tell us about the decline of social media. Enjoy!
News
GoodTime Unveils New Experience+ Suite
GoodTime just released an "AI-powered suite of features aimed at orchestrating the hiring experience for candidates, interviewers, and hiring managers. While every product announcement has to have the "AI-powered" label on it nowadays, I like their focus on both the hiring team and the candidate, especially in the interview process. Instead of automating interviewing completely, they are using AI to best equip the interviewers and the candidate with the background information and logistics questions before the actual conversation takes place. Hat tip to Charles Mah and the team over there. Check out the full features here.
Cornerstone introduces Galaxy, a skills-powered integrated talent management platform
Cornerstone OnDemand, one of the original LMS providers, has created an integrated talent intelligence system called Galaxy. Galaxy allows Cornerstone customers to combine skills intelligence mapping and opportunities for career development with Cornerstone's organizational management capabilities. As Josh Bersin states in his blog:
If Galaxy is as solid as it looked in the demos, some percentage of these buyers could upgrade to Galaxy and avoid the purchase of Gloat, Eightfold, or another LMS.
I'm looking forward to seeing this product in action and hope to get some insight at HR Tech later this month. Check out Josh Bersin's blog here for a complete look into Galaxy.
Salesforce is launching a new AI-driven talent platform for its employees
As noted in an HR Brew ™️ story this week, Salesforce is launching its own internal talent platform called Career Connect. The platform helps its employees gain job experience, skills, and find internal career opportunities. Through initial pilots, it's been a tremendous success with 74% of employees interacting with the platform regularly.
I'm a fan of Salesforce providing ways for their employees to upskill and try new career directions, especially since reading this quote from EVP of Talent Growth and Development Lori Castillo Martinez:
“It can sometimes be hard to find all of those different career opportunities that exist. What Career Connect is actually doing is helping employees think about how they can leverage their current skills and really grow them into meaningful careers in that flow of work.”
The HR Brew crew also notes that other companies such as PwC have also rolled out their own internal marketplaces. I applaud both Salesforce and PwC for realizing the value of engaging your employees with new skills and opportunities to grow in their careers before losing them. Yet, since they both built their solutions in-house, does that mean that there isn't a great internal marketplace solution in the market? Would enterprise organizations save costs by building the internal marketplace off their own HCM system (such as Workday) and then looking to augment it with AI skills intelligence like Galaxy? I'm keeping an eye out to see if other companies follow this path. The full story from HR Brew is available here.
Spotlight - RecFest Nashville is next week!
RecFest is coming to Nashville next week and I'm glad to be connecting with the community in person, making connections, and seeing if my karaoke chops will hold up against John Baldino. This is my first RecFest, but I've heard nothing but good things over the years about the party/festival atmosphere in the UK. I'm hoping to finally meet RecFest head Bobby Leonard and possibly grabbing a pint with Bill Boorman whom I haven't seen in person since pre-COVID. If you are attending, please send me a note so I can come and say hi.
Wikipedia of the Week - Generation Loss
While I was doing research on the decline of LinkedIn, I kept thinking about how I'd heard that if you keep making a copy of a copy, the overall quality of that copy deteriorates. I'd like to say I remembered the concept from something academic, but I'm pretty sure the whole notion came from the 1996 movie Multiplicity starring Michael Keaton and Andie MacDowell. In the movie, Michael Keaton's character creates clones of himself to help with work. His clones are exaggerations of different parts of his personality. Eventually, he makes a clone of a clone that is essentially a moron.
This is an extreme look at a concept called generation loss and I believe that a version of this is happening on LinkedIn. When everyone is copying each other, the overall quality goes down and the only ones that stand out are extreme examples of the copy - the moron clone.
Take a look at the Wikipedia article linked above and see if you can see the similarities.