Controversial App Peeple Thinks It Can Make LinkedIn ‘More Relevant’
Greg Lamboy from Hager Executive Search interviewed for article about controversial app.
We were recently contacted by Inc. Magazine to give our opinion of the Peeple app and how it might be related to executive search. If you’re unfamiliar, Peeple describes itself as an app that “allows you to recommend and be recommended by the people you interact with in your daily lives” and bills itself as a “Yelp for people”; a “mobile application that allows people to leave recommendations for other people based on professional, personal and romantic relationships”.
Peeple has generated some controversy about potential cyberbullying and in its present incarnation, allows anyone with a Facebook profile to log in and comment on another person. The reviewee appears to have some control over what is made public but given the amount of fake Facebook profiles there seems more potential for mischief than anything else. And now Peeple is apparently claiming that it is “an evolution in recruitment solutions” and will make LinkedIn “more relevant”. Hardly.
Being a Retained Executive Search firm based in San Francisco has given us some built in advantages in terms of hearing / learning about the latest technologies. We were utilizing LinkedIn when it had less than a million users and have seen a multitude of other technological “wonders” designed to disrupt executive search come and go.
Our job is to conduct a thorough search on every candidate we connect with to assist our clients in building their perfect executive team. As such, we utilize every online information source we can find to present a clear portrait of the talent to the client (as well as the reverse). But any information we find online is authenticated and checked for veracity just like any claim a candidate may make on their resume. We utilize LinkedIn less as a source for talent and more for verification purposes than anything else. And often times, we’ve found that some LinkedIn profiles are less than accurate in their claims; we know of several instances where talent claim to hold an executive position at a company when we know for a fact they haven’t been with that company for, in some cases, several years.
If in the course of an internet verification we came across a Peeple review that corroborates information we had already found elsewhere, we might give it a moment of consideration. But to claim that it would be a useful, regularly used tool for executive search is a major stretch. Executive search is about understanding a client’s needs and defining what success looks like for both the company and the talent. Anyone claiming that an app or a website is all that is required to solve a client’s challenges is only showing how little they understand about executive search.