How to use LinkedIn for Recruiting
There are no two ways about the fact that LinkedIn is now the most actively used social media tool employed by organizations for recruiting quality talent. With over 225 million profiles and more than 5.8 million business development professionals in the LinkedIn universe, it is virtually a goldmine of talent for recruiters to mine and use.
As per a recent ZALP survey on social media recruiting, 83%of recruiters who use social media use LinkedIn extensively for just about every activity involved in sourcing and hiring employees.
Respondents of a recent Jobvite survey said that they usedLinkedIn to:
• Search for candidates (96%)
• Contact candidates (94%)
• Keep tabs on potential candidates (93%)
• Vet candidates pre-interview (92%)
• Post jobs(91%)
However searching the entire LinkedIn network to fill positions is not child’s play and is likely to cause you much pain and heartburn till you eventually figure out the best way to leverage LinkedIn’s incredible database to pick the talent you really want.
Here are a few tips to help you leverage LinkedIn’s network to source high quality talent.
• Review your job description to ensure that the job and the company sound interesting to the candidate. The first question you should ask yourself when you read through the job description is whether you would be tempted to apply for the job based on the job description provided.
• Ensure that your Company page on LinkedIn and your individual LinkedIn page are complete to establish credibility of yourself and the company. With over 3 million LinkedIn Company Pages existing, the surest way you can get passive talent to consider joining is to ensure that your company page and your individual page contain all the information that might be interesting to job seekers.
• Encourage employees to share open positions and job linkswith their social networks on LinkedIn and elsewhere.One such area that is now extensively popular is using linkedin for employee referrals. Recruiters today are equipped with advanced employee referral tools that allow them to leverage the social and professional networks of their employees to hire the best talent, Linkedin included. These tools enable employees to easily share job openings on their social networks like Linkedin and others thus making every employee a potential recruiter for the organization. These tools are advanced enough to even suggest relevant candidate matches for a particular job to the employee so that the referral process is made even easier.
• Plan and craft InMailrecruiting messagingwith different messages to target active andpassive candidates. Keep your tone friendly and conversational and work out a strategy for reaching out to candidates who have rejected your Inmail summarily.
• Recruiting through Linkedin by participating in LinkedIn groups to build interest in your organization among the participating members and cementingyour company credibility is also an effective strategy. Another way to reach out to your network is by posting regular status updates drawing attention to yourself and to your company.
• LinkedIn also features a question and answer section which can be used for sourcing candidates if used effectively and can also help you build relationships with subject matter experts and influencers within groups. You can post a question related to either a technology or an opening you are hiring for, and invite influencer groups and others to answer to establish contact and build relationships from a recruiting standpoint.
Recruiting is ultimately all about relationship building and is it very essential to use LinkedIn effectively for talent hiring and thus building a great talent pool.
You can read more on latest trends and technologies in recruitment on www.zalp.com/theemployeereferralblog/
