Are you recruiting on LinkedIn yet? LinkedIn is the social media site geared toward careers. It claims to have over 100 million professionals using the service to exchange information, referrals, recommendations, ideas and opportunities, so there’s no denying it’s a force HR professionals need to know about and a potential tool in recruiting toolbox. However, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can waste a lot of time and effort spinning your wheels.
Effectively incorporating this interactive technology into your recruitment efforts can be a win-win situation for both your new hires and your organization. In a BLR webinar titled “LinkedIn for HR: How to Get the Most From Online Recruiting,” Kelly Dingee outlined the importance of utilizing your network while recruiting on LinkedIn.
Recruiting on LinkedIn: Using Your Network to Your Advantage
“Networking the most important thing you have to do on this site as a recruiting professional.” Dingee explained in the webinar. There can be a major benefit to networking online to people you meet and people you’ve known in the past. You can even connect to people you’ve never met, if you chose, to build your network and allow you to really use the networking feature of the site.
The network is important because of the way LinkedIn is structured. Some features of LinkedIn are based on the degrees of separation. “When you’re trying to look within the site – when you’re using the internal search functionality – you are limited by your degrees of connections. So, the more first-degree connections you have, the more of a presence you can have to view into the site . . . it can really be to your benefit to connect to a lot of different people . . . to give you the reach you want.”
Growing your network is pretty easy on the site. You can add “connections” by sending invitations to people you know. LinkedIn will also help you find people you may know by offering suggestions of others who list the same employer, school, or former employer as you.
Recruiting on LinkedIn: Growing Your Network Fast
Want to grow your network fast? There are a lot of tools available online that allow you to connect with people you may not have otherwise come into contact with. One such tool is www.toplinked.com; this site has both free and paid memberships to allow you to grow your network faster.
You do have to be aware that LinkedIn has policies surrounding who you can connect to, so be sure to read their terms of service before you begin growing your network quickly.
There are many decisions surrounding your network as well; these are just a few examples:
- How selective do you want to in your connections? Will you connect only to people you interact with in person, or will you expand your network online?
- Do you want everyone who views your page to know who you know? In other words, do you want your connections on the site to be visible to others who view your page, or would you prefer they not see them?
Recruiting on LinkedIn: Utilizing Your Network
Once you have built a network to your liking, there are a lot of ways to get benefits from it. Dingee advised that “it’s important to talk to your network and engage. Status update and summary are two great ways to do that.”
Status update is on your profile. You can auto-feed this from Twitter if you link to your Twitter account, or you can update it manually. The status update is a great way to share with your network. From the recruiting perspective, this is a great way to advise of job openings.
Summaries are also on your profile and are a way for recruiting professionals to get a summary of what a candidate does. Your company can use this space to promote the company to your network.
For more information on recruiting on LinkedIn, order the webinar recording. To register for a future webinar, visit http://catalog.blr.com/audio/source/HAC/Effort/22.
Kelly Dingee is a strategic recruiting manager and leads the research team at Staffing Advisors. Ms. Dingee has a passion for social media and uses LinkedIn daily to source and hire candidates for clients at Staffing Advisors.