LinkedIn For Business: Hype, Help, or Hurt?

July 18, 2018

Career / Business

While it can be a significant time trap, LinkedIn is much more than a place to post resume profiles. As THE social media site for business, it has over 100 million profiles in the US alone, and each profile consists of an online resume which allows you to “connect” with millions of other users, so they see what you’re up to and vice versa. In fact, a lot of business gets done on LinkedIn. Social media technology makes it easy to connect and share information with contacts or groups of contacts who then share with their groups of connections etc.

LinkedIn: Knowing a Guy Who Knows the Right Guy

In the early days of the internet, most interaction was done anonymously which hindered the trust necessary for doing real commerce. Social media solves this trust problem by using the concept of chavra chavra is lei (basically “your friends have friends too”). While you probably won’t do a significant business deal with a stranger, how about with your brother-in-law’s family or friends? On LinkedIn, your direct contacts (first level connection) link you to their contacts (second level) who may introduce to their contacts (third level). The compounding effect of these interlocked rings of trust dramatically broadens your pool of potential clients, employees and business partners.

Say Mr. Cohn is looking to hire. He can blindly Google up some vendors but why would he trust any of them? Instead, through LinkedIn, he may discover that one of his 2nd connections say a cousin’s friend, is also a qualified. That connection, with no conflict of interest, suggests a worker they’ve used, which is much more reliable.

Yidden and the Math behind Social Media

The math behind LinkedIn’s power is compelling. Between family, schoolmates, associates, and friends most frum people can easily begin with at least 100 distinct connections. This modest contact list, however, grows to 10,000 when including second level connections (100 friends each sharing 100 friends) and 1 million links on the third level (10,000 second connections times 100)! LinkedIn’s colossal network and powerful search capability turned it into an indispensable information source on potential employees, employers, vendors, sales leads and other derivative data. Need a trustworthy real estate broker who specializes in golf courses in the state of Florida? Want to speak to someone in Toronto who used to work for Google? Trying to find a frum party planner in Dallas? Chances are you are connected to someone on LinkedIn who can help you.

Jewish Geography

If you think about it, LinkedIn just tremendously simplifies the process of spreading information and trust which has been going on for thousands of years. Playing “Jewish geography” is a favorite pastime of ours, and at every simcha, dinner or just casual interaction, we tend to try to find a common connection with the Jews around us. The initial start off questions (“Nu. Where are you from? Where did you go to yeshiva? Where do you daven?”) allow us to quickly home in (“Schwartz from 54th or 49th? R’ Dovid or R’ Avrohom Yehoshua? Real Estate or Nursing Homes?”). The winner of the game is whoever first finds the family bond or at least some personal connection to a seeming stranger (your sisters’ best friend was in seminary with my second cousin).

Perhaps this is why social media is such a Jewish business: think of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, and Whatsapp’s Jan Koum! Far from simple yentaschaft, extensive interlocking relationships build the extraordinary communal trust which drives much of our lives including our shidduchim, philanthropy, school and shopping choices, and also business dealings.

Think Before You Post

Like any powerful tool, LinkedIn can be misused and even counterproductive. As a business-oriented community, it is much less problematic than other social media, but sloppy usage will still lead to much distraction and wasted time. Worse is the risk of the leakage of critical company intelligence or wrong first impressions from poor profiles and sharing habits. These potential downsides can be controlled with a bit of practice, the proper usage of LinkedIn’s privacy controls and most importantly: some common sense. In the days of the printing press, the line went: “Not everything that you think should be said, not everything you say should be written, not everything written should be printed.” Today one needs to add: “Not everything that’s printed should be posted.”