Recruiting via Linkedin As the world’s largest professional network, LinkedIn has over 100 million members and continues to grow by 1 million new members every week. In December 2010, there were 5+ million members in the UK alone – no wonder levels of interest in this platform are souring amongst HR Professionals.
Linkedin have launched dedicated recruitment tools such as LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Talent, which are designed to enable HR Departments explore the true potential of LinkedIn as part of your recruitment strategy. Technology which has been implemented by many blue-chip organisations.
But for those who don’t have an extensive recruitment budget to invest in just one platform, or perhaps who have yet to convince the powers that be that LinkedIn is an effective recruitment tool this is often not an option.
So what can an SME get from LinkedIn and how can they test the water so to speak? Here are a few tips to get you started.
Building your network:
The first thing to remember that your visibility on LinkedIn is restricted to your network- and ultimately the number of connections you have. Building a network which would enable you to view every single profile on Linkedin is almost impossible and would take considerable time and investment. In addition LinkedIn limit you to 30,000 1st tier connections, and an initial limit of just 3,000 invitations, which means you will need to rely a 10:1 of people asking you to connect rather than inviting them.
But let’s look at this logically, you are a business located in a specific location, within a specific industry and focussed on delivering a particular product or service. Do you want to connect with everyone or is it more worthwhile to focus your attention on those who reflect your target audience?
Paid job listings:
LinkedIn’s paid job listings are again an effective tool but why not consider the free options available to you first. All groups have a jobs section and posting vacancies within a group is perfectly acceptable amongst the vast majority of groups. After all if your vacancy is relevant and of interest, members will be pleased to be notified of your role – but again this relies on the knowledge of what groups you should be part of and the ability to change according to the role. Another option is to create your own job group – invite people to become a member of your group and as long as you can provide them with relevant information you will create your own dedicated talent pool!
Your corporate profile page:
Not only can you create a company profile page to showcase your business but you can also ascertain a lot of information from your company insights that can help with your recruitment focus.
For example: You can see which other companies that people looked at after looking at your company profile – are these competitors, or businesses that could have potential employees with the skill set your require? If not take a look at the actual businesses your current employees came from and where they go to – a clear indication of the transferable skill sets between the businesses.
As a LinkedIn User you will soon learn the wealth of information that is available and the possible methods that can be adopted. LinkedIn is definitely not just a “business orientated social networking platform” but a highly effective recruitment tool – but the key to reaping the success has to be the development of a clearly defined strategy.
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