Outdated Linked-In profiles are jeopardising career prospects of employees in Manchester and undoing pro-active efforts to tailor personal information for each role, according to new research from global specialist employment recruiter Randstad.
Manchester workers are ahead of the curve when it comes to tailoring their CV for job applications, more than half (55%) of employees in Manchester adapt their CV for different job applications, compared to just 46% of UK workers on average.
However, only one in 10 Manchester employees (9%) amends their LinkedIn profiles to match when applying for a new job. This is well below the UK average of 15%, and means that 86% of workers in Manchester overall don’t update their LinkedIn pages at all when job hunting.
A staggering third (32%) of Mancunians don’t bother to tailor either their CV or LinkedIn profile.
However Mancunians are among the most concerned about the impact their social media posts may have on their employment prospects.
Three in five Manchester workers (61%) doubt they would have been hired for their current role if they hadn’t been able to alter the privacy settings on their social media beforehand, above the nationwide average of 55%.
One-sixth (16%) of workers in Manchester believe they would have lost out on a job if their employers had unrestricted access to their full social media profiles, the highest proportion of any city across the UK.
Just 39% of Manchester employees are confident they would still have landed the role if their future bosses had been able to view all the information about them available on the internet.
Victoria Short, managing director of Randstad Care, said:
“With new opportunities, come new threats – and while LinkedIn has now become a firm fixture in working lives, it opens up a fresh minefield for users to negotiate when looking for the next career step. While workers in Manchester appear to be better than most at brushing up their CV for each new opportunity, they are forgetting that in this digital age you effectively have a rolling CV online that also needs to keep pace with current skills to put you in the running.”
