Applicants to Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management can now incorporate their LinkedIn profiles as part of the school’s redesigned application.
Johnson is using LinkedIn’s open platform to allow MBA applicants to pre-fill employment history, educational background and other parts of their application with information from their LinkedIn profiles. Candidates who submit information in this way are asked to grant the school access to their full LinkedIn profiles as part of the application process.
“We don’t know of anyone else who is using LinkedIn in this way,” Heidi Russell, operations manager for the Johnson School’s admissions office, told Inside Higher Ed. (A spokesperson from LinkedIn said the company couldn’t confirm whether any other colleges or universities are using the same tools in the same way.)
Using LinkedIn as part of the application process isn’t mandatory, especially since some candidates come from geographic regions without access to LinkedIn, Johnson Interim Director of Admissions Ann Richards told Inside Higher Ed. Applicants who choose to manually fill in information rather than populating from LinkedIn will not be at a disadvantage, apart from the fact that the process will not be as streamlined, Richards added.
Johnson tried out the LinkedIn-enhanced feature earlier this year with its one-year MBA program at Cornell Tech in New York City. The Cornell Tech application test run helped determine that the feature could be very useful in admissions. “It was so much more enlightening,” Russell told Inside Higher Ed. “It gave us so much more insight into who [the applicants] were.”
Johnson has already received one LinkedIn-enhanced submission for its two-year MBA program since the new application went live on July 1st, according to the Inside Higher Ed report.
