“Sociable” is the latest commentary on important social media developments and trends from industry expert Andrew Hutchinson of Social Media Today.
LinkedIn has announced a new verification badge for recruiters in the app, which will help to address the raft of recruitment scams and spammy outreach.
As you can see in these examples, recruiters will now be able to confirm their identity in order to get a new in-stream badge that confirms they are who they say.
Recruiters will be able to confirm their identity via LinkedIn Recruiter, which will soon include this as an optional process, similar to LinkedIn’s ID confirmation system for regular users, which provides a verification tick, denoting that the user has gone through the ID process.
LinkedIn launched its free user verification process in April last year, which sees LinkedIn working with third party ID verification providers in different regions to confirm the details of users.
Which, as you can see, adds a similar tick icon to your profile in the app, alerting other members that you are, indeed, a real person, and not a bot account set up to steal user data.
That’s helped to add extra assurance to the process, and LinkedIn says that it has had an impact on overall engagement, with verified profiles seeing 60% more profile views, 50% more comments and reactions on their posts, and 30% more messages.
Which is why this expansion makes sense, while it’ll also, as noted, help LinkedIn combat the rise of scammy recruiting pitches in the app.
As per LinkedIn:
“Based on our own data and reports from platforms across the internet, we know that posing as a recruiter is a common way bad actors attempt to scam people. While we successfully intercept the majority of detected fake accounts and scams, verification is a step in our ongoing efforts to help foster genuine and trustworthy interactions on LinkedIn.”
So, now you’ll have an additional way to confirm whether that job offer on LinkedIn is from a legitimate source, or just some scammer looking to dupe you into connecting.
Which might be a little less fun, as it’s sometimes a bit of a lift to get a random job offer in the app, even if it is a scam. But it will be an improvement overall, helping to address this element.
The new recruiter verification will be available to recruiters who use LinkedIn Recruiter beginning in mid-April.
