How to recruit on LinkedIn in 2013
- Published on 7 Jun 2013
- Mark Gray
LinkedIn is now the preferred choice for searching for talent. US research reveals 93% of recruiters visit this network before they go anywhere else.
Founded a decade ago, LinkedIn is the world’s largest business-oriented social network with more than 200 million members in over 200 countries and territories. It targets professionals defined as individuals with careers built on distinctive qualifications. The depth of information LinkedIn collects on its members and strong search function makes it ideal to source white-collar, mid-to-senior-level talent.
In South Africa, LinkedIn has 2.3 million members. Of these, there are:
- 2 344 business development directors;
- 20 395 senior engineers; and
- 14 425 marketing managers: 5 658 are women (2 887 are Johannesburg-based) and you can zero-in on prospects at specific companies such as like Unilever, SABMiller and Brandhouse.
Since LinkedIn first launched its hiring solutions over five years ago, it has steadily evolved its toolset over time. Here is an introduction to the latest tools LinkedIn has to offer from a social recruitment tool perspective:
- Recruiter enables HR professionals to expand their searches beyond personal connections to access the entire LinkedIn network. Using powerful filters and LinkedIn’s advanced search interface, HR professionals can zero-in on their ideal candidates even faster: They can view contacts’ names and full profiles outside their own network and can even use InMail messages to contact top talent directly.
Your HR team’s activities can further be synchronised with the following tools to build, track and manage talent in a healthy pipeline:
- Shared profiles;
- Searches;
- Projects; and
-Candidate notes.
- Jobs helps HR professionals put jobs in front of the right candidates. Using sophisticated algorithms to match jobs and profile data, LinkedIn automatically targets the most relevant candidates with a specific job.
HR professionals can share personalised jobs with top talent:
- When candidates visit their LinkedIn home pages;
- On employees’ profile pages; or
- On the company’s career pages.
Great candidates can be driven to high-priority roles with a sponsored jobs placement or HR practitioners can bid for premium job placement in LinkedIn’s personalised job recommendations. Jobs can also be distributed to thousands of other websites because they are shared across social media networks. - Career pages let HR practitioners create a customised career site to show off your employer brand and culture as part of your social recruitment strategy.
Using images, video, employee testimonials and more, companies can create a hub that tells a rich story about who you are as a company. Every time a relevant candidate logs in to their LinkedIn home page, they will see a recruitment ad encouraging them to follow the particular company.
Based on their LinkedIn profiles, the career page experience can be tailored to each viewer using dynamic messaging. This includes automatically showing each visitor, to your career page, the jobs that are most relevant to them. - Work With Us allows HR practitioners to own the advertising space on their current employees’ LinkedIn profiles. By reaching candidates in the context of their trusted relationships with your existing employees, this translates into a subconscious endorsement of the advert. Companies can display personalised jobs to each viewer using personal details and granular targeting capabilities to spotlight a company for the kind of candidate it is trying to reach.
For example, an investment firm could feature an actuary’s photo and name in an advert with the job title, “fund manager”, and say, “Dear John, Picture yourself with this job.” In addition to LinkedIn features, companies can also create custom ad content to grow their follower base and showcase career opportunities.
What is LinkedIn being used for?
Many HR recruiters are now using LinkedIn to market current job openings to active job seekers. Others are also using LinkedIn to find and engage passive candidates who are not trying to change jobs but would be open to an offer. By exposing them to a strong employer brand message that stays in the back of their minds, HR recruiters can fill job openings quicker when top talent leaves the company.
One of the biggest mistakes HR practitioners can make is to post jobs on personal profiles to avoid paying for LinkedIn Premium to access the hiring solutions. Candidates quickly start viewing the untargeted, irrelevant job posts as spam, while they only reach a fraction of South Africa’s total talent database. The failure of such campaigns is an inadequate reflection of LinkedIn, which is very effective when used correctly.
