I knew this would come sooner or later. I always had a tepid reaction to LinkedIn. I found it to be too “corporate” and lack emotion. What did happen was that it gained critical mass among recruiters and the tech community. It certainly became relevant. I have got a lot of calls and requests for interesting opportunities by both recruiters, founders, and former coworkers through LinkedIn.

Whenever I go to LinkedIn to look at profiles from a recruiting standpoint, I seem to get a good sense of a candidate career wise, but I have no clue about their personality. When it comes to small teams and long hours, working with people you like and share interests with is paramount. I like to see what books they are reading or what they like to do on the weekends. After all, these are quite standard questions in most interviews. That being said, I figured that MySpace would eventually be a better play. I was certainly wrong that MySpace was not able to evolve into something better. It has not escaped its soft porn and spamming roots.

Enter Facebook. Once they opened it up to non .edu addresses, everyone I knew left MySpace in droves! Facebook provided a classier spam-free alternative to MySpace. And even more important for recruiters was the fact that the college educated crowd mainly uses Facebook. MySpace and Facebook seem to mirror standard social divisions in this country.

As we all know Facebook has gained tremendous momentum the past couple of years. At this point the majority of Facebook users are college students, high school students entering college, or college grads. It is natural that these people have an interest in career development and networking opportunities. Many users are engaging with Facebook both socially and professionally which has led to recruiters and companies to start looking at Facebook as a talent pool. At this rate, Facebook is slowly entering LinkedIn’s territory. LinkedIn has enough users that it isn’t just going to go away, but my bet is that people will gravitate to using Facebook as a recruiting tool more and more to the point that users will rather spend more time updating their Facebook profile than their LinkedIn profile.