The Next Milestone 400 Members

The Boulder Net LinkedIn group has now reached 400 members milestone. Join the group to collaborate with professionals who are local to you. If you are thinking of relocating to Boulder, network now with local professionals to ease your move.

60% growth in the last 1 month

What a difference one month makes!
The Boulder Net Linked In Group  took six months to reach a milestone of 100 members.
But in the month of July it grew 60%, adding 60 members in 30 days.

What changed?  LinkedIn  finally added search functionality to the Groups. So when you search for Boulder, the Boulder Net shows up in the first page.

The other is the viral effect that is proportional to the number of members. As their LinkedIn status updates show that they joined the group, more people in their network see it and click on the group to join.

It will be interesting to see if this growth is just the initial bump or a sustainable one.

Boulder Net Reaches Its First Milestone - 100 members

The group on LinkedIn was started in January and it took six months to grow to 100 members. Compared to most groups on LinkedIn this is a small group. The group could have been bigger if I had approved the requests from those "LION"s who join any and every group just to get access to LinkedIn members. I turn away those requests unless they show some Colorado in their past.

The Blog on the other hand gets no readers. It serves only one purpose now, to get Google search presence.

May be things will change in the second of this year.

Do you LinkedIn?

I do not say this pejoratively, from my experience I have seen a consistent pattern in LinkedIn activities that can be tied to people's planned career moves or their expectation that something is not right at their current company. I did not do controlled experiments nor do I have hard data, but I have seen flurry of activities during layoff times. People update their profile, start making many new connections and seek out endorsements.

One thing I would say is to have your resume, LinkedIn profile and connections updated constantly and not in reaction to external events. The time to start networking is not when you need the job but when you already have one and is really looking to build a network that is not based on quid pro quo. It is very hard to make a withdrawal right away from a network. It takes time to nurture it.

So do not wait to network until you need it. In fact, the macroeconomic studies of unemployment numbers state that people who already have a job are more likely to find other jobs than those who are unemployed. This is attributed to exposure to other professionals the job provides and the stigma associated with being unemployed. When you reach out to others when you already have a job there is a higher probability of cementing a relationship because others are less worried about the give and take of the relationship.

You cannot cram an year worth of profile and network updates in a month, so pace yourself and do it more regularly.

Mutual Endorsements

If you and your colleague write recommendations to each other in your LinkedIn profiles, do both of these cancel out each other?

Perhaps a little, but mostly it does not matter. For one thing no one is going to dig deep to follow the link to see the list of your recommendations. Secondly, I do not believe the recommendations add any more value than simple signal that you are not making it all up in your profile.

I would like to believe I add some value to others with my recommendations. So I do not display in my profile recommendations from people who I had endorsed. In fact I do not display any of the endorsements I received.

My LinkedIn profile is perennially incomplete.

I wonder if my recommendations of others tell something about me and my people management skills.

LinkedIn Endorsements

LinkedIn has a feature that allows you to endorse your connections or to receive endorsement from them. LinkedIn encourages people to get recommendations by indicating that your profile is only 80% complete, add four more recommendations and it will be 100% complete. This is a nice marketing message, people usually react to this positively.

Do these endorsements matter?
By definition you only accept positive endorsements and hence all of these are positive. So how can one make any judgment based on all positive endorsements? Even though these are all glowing and positive, the fact that someone has taken time to write you one is a positive sign.

Some recruiters who post on LinkedIn say in their posting, "you need to have endorsements if you want to apply for this job". I bet they are not going to make their decisions on the text in the endorsement as much as the presence of it. Their logic probably is, "if you cannot even get your closest colleagues to endorse you, I do not want to look at your resume".

My conclusion is endorsements add value only as a signal to the reviewer that they can spend more time in your profile/resume. After that initial screening, the endorsements don't matter much.