With a user base of around 100 million in the United States alone (as of 2014), LinkedIn is fast emerging as one of the best online professional networks to recruit employees. This Workspirited article will give you some good suggestions on how to use LinkedIn effectively for recruiting the right employees.
― Karen Halliday, Senior Executive Consultant, Coast Specialist Recruitment
The days of mailing a job application and receiving an appointment letter via the post are long gone. In this new era of technology, the buzzword is ‘networking‘. It is virtually impossible to live without communicating via social networking sites. Apart from just chatting away, sharing photos, videos, advertising your business, and exchanging news, one of the primary tasks these sites accomplish is helping job seekers get jobs and companies recruit staff or employees. One site that immediately comes to mind while talking about jobs and recruitment is LinkedIn.
Ever since its inception, this networking site has steadily increased its user base, and it strictly adheres to the protocol of developing and maintaining business contacts and relations. It is an important communication medium as far as business promotion is concerned, and a majority of companies use it to hire the correct people. In the paragraphs given below, you will come across some effective tips regarding how to use LinkedIn for recruiting.
LinkedIn boasts of certain features or tools that can prove of invaluable help while choosing the right candidate. Generally, recruiters are paid members of LinkedIn. Being a paid member enables a recruiter to search profiles faster and directly message potential candidates. Here are some of the best tools useful for recruiting.
It is a tool that showcases the most recent and popular companies. It also searches for popular titles within the network. In short, it gives you a visual idea of what is most searched by companies, and a list of job postings and blogs.
With Talent Finder, you can search talented people from within your network as well as your friends’ networks. This tool helps narrow down your search.
It keeps you updated about the activity on your account without you having to visit the site, i.e., it integrates LinkedIn directly into Google Chrome, thus helping you to share things and provide easy access to your updates.
As the name suggests, it allows you to instantly search for anything you want, within your network. Also, there are other search options and filters, which allow you to search throughout the site for any profile, post, or update you may need.
With the help of this tool, LinkedIn supports most of the mobile applications. Employers can access LinkedIn on the go, making selection and other processes fairly easy.
This tool enables the user or potential employer to place different product or job ads strategically. It also allows companies to pay a fee and have the site sponsor their ads for their needs.
A recent innovation, this tool is specially designed for employers to check short-listed or chosen candidates. It also helps recruiters check how many people are viewing and applying for their posted jobs.
It is an internal e-mail tool for sending messages. However, you need to be cautious to script your messages perfectly.
The site offers a multitude of professional groups. You can join any of them and connect with different people. This helps you to expand your business connections and gather useful contacts.
This feature brings together the world’s top business magnates to share their valuable insights with users. It is an invite-only program.
Employers must build their company’s profile, regularly update the profile, share information about products and services, and display links to other social media websites as well. Also, employers need to highlight career opportunities. For this, they just need to click ‘Companies’ at the top of the home page and choose ‘Add a Company’. Then, they need to enter certain necessary information about their company (address, contact, etc.) Having such pages helps the employers to provide essential details about themselves. Posted jobs will automatically link to their company page.
As mentioned above, you need to post the available jobs along with the necessary qualifications that you may desire in your employee. Search your friends’ connections. Post updates about the postings on your status line. Also, post your job openings in all the relevant groups.
This is an important step to use this site effectively. Use LinkedIn’s paid recruiting options. Use the already existing networks. Rapidly market your company and your requirements on every group and every other network. Prospective employees must be able to easily find out what kind of people you need.
Use Talent Finder to search for the right people. View candidates by browsing their profiles. You can connect to different candidates through InMail, job postings, and sponsored jobs. Screen and verify them using talent filters. You can find out your type of candidate, but even glancing through his contacts and groups will give you an idea about the kind of things he is interested in. Target those candidates you think are good enough to be scrutinized further. Also, a major blunder most employers are likely to make here is to target active candidates. Avoid doing that. Just because a person is not overtly active on the network doing a number of things does not mean he is a fool. In fact, some of the best candidates could be fairly passive on LinkedIn.
Groups are a free resource, and you can participate in groups and post status updates. Mingle with all the groups, as they also let people of similar interests discuss different topics. You can network with other business heads, and you may gain insight into what the current job-seeking candidates are looking for. You will also find out their interests, hobbies, which candidates are experts in their fields, etc. You can also access employees’ networks for referrals.
The above pointers are just a gist of how you can use LinkedIn efficiently for recruiting. You can employ your own ways of targeting potential candidates and hiring them. Now here’s some more information about the background and functioning of LinkedIn.
- LinkedIn is the world’s largest, professional, business-oriented social networking site.
- It was founded by Reid Hoffman towards the end of the year 2002 and launched in the beginning of the year 2003.
- It is headquartered at Mountain View, California, and is available in more than 20 languages.
- It is mainly used for professional networking and as of January 2014, it has a global user base of more than 300 million.
- It has features that help in advertising, job search, finding efficient staff, connecting with the right groups, and making useful contacts.
- Similar to its counterparts, Facebook and Twitter, LinkedIn allows you to create a profile as well, that will include your resume and other related qualifications.
- Your work here is mainly business-based, i.e., your groups and conversations will mainly focus on the working side of your life.
- Once you create an account, you can start looking for ‘connections‘, which is the keyword here. The idea is to have as many connections as possible and create your own professional circle.
- If you choose a paid membership, you can organize your profile better, directly message people, search profiles faster, etc.
- You can get recommendations, job offers, access to many business profiles and websites, etc.
LinkedIn is on its way to becoming a major source to find talent in the coming years, and it is essential that you learn to make full use of its tools and features to hire the abundance of talent out there.