LinkedIn Profiles - More Accurate Than Resumes (Sad But True...)

From HRCapitalist  June 22, 2009

So
I couldn't make it to last week's Social Recruiting Summit at Google to
speak, but as an end user I was obviously interested in the
conversation, so I plugged in from time to time via the streaming
video.  Good stuff, and here was an early takeaway that I thought I
would share:

LinkedIn profiles maintained by a candidate are more accurate than the Resume maintained by the same candidate...

Think about that one for a second.  Wait for it - there you go - the
clarity and realization that if you're truly looking for "what's up"
with a candidate, you need to rely on the LinkedIn profile.  Why is
that true?  Because there's a community of co-workers, friends and past
colleagues that always have access to the LinkedIn profile, and there's
no such community with constant visibility to a random resume the
candidate sends in, and you have no means to circulate the resume to
that type of community to fact check.

The result?  As Reid Hoffman discussed at the Social Recruiting
summit - people won't lie in public via LinkedIn.  With that in mind,
the core elements at play in most LinkedIn profiles - the titles, the
dates, etc. - are always going to be more accurate than the resume.

Here's the tricky part - when you're looking for a candidate to
unfold what they did at ACME Inc., the LinkedIn profile doesn't usually
include the 5-6 bullet points you're usually used to seeing on the
resume, right?  That's a key component to understanding the context of
what they did.

With that in mind, is the day coming (from an accuracy and honesty
perspective) when we'll ask candidates to update their LinkedIn
profiles with more detailed information on what they did at ACME?

If you have over 100 contacts on LinkedIn, I'd doubt you'll lie in a big way.  Too much crowd-sourcing going on...