The LinkedIn Search I Wish I Had

While LinkedIn has become an indispensible tool in recruiting, it still amazes me how primitive it remains for matching great candidates to great companies. Below is the LinkedIn search I wish I could express, which is of course pure fiction today. But in the fiction is a commentary on the state of the recruiting industry, which reminds me in many ways of the internet search industry in 1996: applying human labor to a problem that can only be solved with smart software.

It's time for the job hunting equivalent of PageRank: a service that collects relevant data from different sources (e.g. GitHub, Twitter, blogs, Crunchbase, Glassdoor), and applies smart algorithms to match the right candidates with the right companies. Rather than funding more companies that focus on automating a "marketplace" (e.g. Toptal and Hired.com), I wish venture capitalists would spend that time trying to find the next Larry and Sergey of recruiting: technologists with a radically new idea of how we can automate hiring.