Linked In recommendations: Your job happiness Barometer

“A purely non geeky writing for geeks”

Disclaimer: The article reflects my personal view based on my small experience in life.

How do you tell if your employee is not happy and is dropping CV at different places? How can you tell that the organization you are working for is not running so well and there may be job cuts? How do you tell if your colleague is planning to move to a new job? 

Well ... there are many ways of finding that out but one of the early indicators can be that person's Linked In activity. I must say that it is not a definite pointer but it's a trend that you can watch.

Recommendations
First early indication of people wanting to change their jobs is that they will start to get recommendations. This process may start one to six months before they change their jobs but the usual time is 3 months before. Now how does this work or how is getting recommendations related to changing jobs?

Well this is how it works ... When someone is unhappy with his job and thinks or plans to move on, then he tries to get recommendations for finding a new job. This is quite rational since the person thinks that a recommendation might help him/her in the future job. Now this may not be done at the very moment the person decided to leave but at the very moment he seriously considered getting another job.

So if you are working for some company and your supervisor starts getting recommendations then you should too. Or if you are in a startup company and your CTO, CEO are getting recommendations then start packing because the company is going down and you are among the first ones to go out the door.

Check out new company before you join
If you are going to join a new company check out their employees at Linked In to see how many of them have gotten recommended in past 3 months. If the number is high then it is an indication of unhappy work environment or a job without career growth.

Other elements
Now a days people have become very expressive and they want to let the world know what they are doing by using Facebook or Twitter. But nothing tells you that someone is looking for better options like Linked In recommendations.

Why?
What I have told you sounds stupid? Can’t people go and ask for recommendations for other reasons? Some people do. But most of us don’t. And if you are a software developer and a good one then I must say that you don’t have a habit of changing jobs. So when do people keep asking for recommendations? (a) when they are angry on their supervisor , (b) when they feel that that their current job is not taking them anywhere, (c) people ask their supervisors to recommend them when they think they will look for better opportunities and it is the best time to get recommendations from their supervisors before thing get bitter. 

Comments

[Nirjhar, Lutfar]

very nice and interesting article. :)

[rjhintz]

While I can see why observing a spike in LinkedIn recommendations might lead to your conclusion, one counter example might be recommendations in a group of people who, for example, talk about LinkedIn among themselves at lunch and collectively decide to do LinkedIn makeovers. They're reasonably happy with their jobs, but they want to kaizen their profiles.

So, they refactor their profiles in line with best practices and both make and solicit recommendations among their group of contacts to improve their LinkedIn "score."

[Shafqat Ahmed]

Yes, you are right. But my writing is from my personal experience and observation and have no objective scientific basis.

However even in the case that you have mentioned, my question is why would a group of people start getting recommendations suddenly. It is an action that requires some thought behind it like who to ask, who would recommend me etc. So behind that action to improve their linked in score, an idea to move into a better work scenario is at play.

[salehoo]

I change jobs every 3 months...