LinkedIn- No Irish Jobs

43 LinkedIn Business Groups with over 150,000 members but less than 300 jobs.

LinkedIn is a great business networking tool; however when it comes to Irish jobs for people seeking employment (sales, marketing, management) in Ireland it does not look so good. I am a member of 50 business groups on LinkedIn; of these the 43 Irish business groups I am a member of are focused on Irish business, sales, management, marketing and technology.

As the Irish economy is booming with projected growth rates of between 4.6% and 5.7% in 2015 and 2016 (rte, NTMA) and as we are well into 2015 I wanted to check out how the jobs available on my LinkedIn groups were going to be able to keep up with the skill shortage the Irish press love to write about.

The table below lists out the 43 group NAMES I am a member of, with the membership numbers and then jobs or roles available. Of the 354 roles available when you remove duplicate postings on multiple groups the number drops well below 300. Also with my Ireland Inc. hat on, I could only find 1 or 2 roles for local Irish companies, are these numbers a truer reflection on the local Irish economy, 2 roles across 43 very active LinkedIn groups?

• The 171 roles on Sales Leadership Ireland are dominated by Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, AdRoll where local SME’s seem to have very few jobs.
• The 150 roles on Irish Executives contain a number of roles duplicated on Sales Leadership Ireland
• Social Media Ireland had 1 local role.

What do these numbers tell us?

Well, the numbers tell us the average membership size on the 43 LinkedIn groups I belong to related to Ireland is 3,637. Again there is a large overlap with people being members of multiple groups. A quick calculation would suggest out of the 156,419 members on the groups, maybe 130,000 are unique profiles.

The numbers also tell us when roles within multi-national companies are removed there are very few open roles in local Irish companies.

I will leave it to the reader to draw their own conclusions and comments. Maybe companies simple do not use LinkedIn to advertise their open positions, maybe there are none. Maybe LinkedIn is not good at getting smaller companies to advertise available jobs, or maybe, just maybe the small number of job roles within local Irish companies is an accurate reflection of the local Irish economy.