Management in this company is distinctly lacking experience and procedures to follow. They want to position themselves as employers on a par with the likes of Google and Facebook, but they are significantly lacking programmes for staff development and training to make this the case.
Training repeatedly promised during my time there, was never delivered. Procedures and the ‘LinkedIn way’ of doing things were constantly alluded to but never clarified or laid out through training or mentorship. This was particularly evident with standards and targets, where concrete targets were NEVER clearly communicated. Requests for feedback go unanswered, quarterly reviews don’t happen (!), and when this is questioned, vague, non-committal responses are provided… again, highlighting the inexperience of the management.
Standard processes and procedures are non-existent in the LinkedIn Dublin office. Promotion ladders are quickly climbed for favoured staff members, where others are deliberately excluded from application. There was no evidence of a HR involvement with internal departmental management or promotion.
It is clear that a policy of over-recruiting for certain teams exists as a means to hedge their bets in terms of handling market growth. Unfortunately, LinkedIn’s lack of monitoring or projecting their growth and lack of understanding their customer requirements means that they have no way to predict the volumes they expect their staff to handle… over-staffing in these departments leads to a low case numbers and poaching between team mates in an attempt to reach unrealistic targets. These staff are kept in an extended probationary period as a way to dispose of them when it becomes necessary. Unfortunately for LinkedIn, Ireland is a small place and this practice of ‘probationary recruitment’ has been noticed by some of the main recruitment companies.
The most frightening example of poor management staff handling I witnessed was during the visit of the CEO Jeff Weiner in Dublin, Irish employees were asked to be seated in the front row and meet him whereas the foreign employees from Brazil, Italy, Portugal, and France were asked to step back. There’s a word for that…discrimination.
For a company providing recruitment products LinkedIn’s own recruitment procedures are alarming and considerably off base from their supposed ideals. Calls from initial recruiter outside available contact hours, repeated rescheduling interviews and meetings as managers were ‘travelling’ or ‘sick’ meant that a recruitment period of 6 weeks required 5 interviews, each with different members of staff and HR representatives, and a language test.
Even after head-hunting and recruiting from other well-known Dublin based companies like Google, PayPal and Facebook, the obvious ineptitude of management levels in LinkedIn Dublin means that many of these staff left within a short period to return to their previous employers.
It is clear that LinkedIn (Dublin) is still in shaky start-up territory. A massive recruitment push to prove to the American offices that Dublin is effective venture has led to selection of poor, inexperienced managers who, without guidelines to follow or a clear idea of how they want to expand the company (or maybe they do know, but they never communicate them to staff) are flying blind and believing their own hype.
