7 Tips to use LinkedIn as effective Recruitment Tool

LinkedIn and other social networking sites are advantageous who use them for both networking and recruiting. LinkedIn doesn’t have the buzz or the customer base of Facebook or a Twitter, but it has quietly changed the way many jobs get filled. LinkedIn provides you massive amount of information about whom to call and whom to ask about, making the process much more efficient. Maximize this advantage by building your network every day.

Professional recruiters pay lot of money for premium LinkedIn features, but even the basic service can be a powerful recruiting tool if you know how to use it. Here’s how to get the most out of LinkedIn without hitting the pocket.

Here’s 7 tips how to get the most out of LinkedIn for your recruitment needs:

Focus on Your Visibility

Create a profile for your company and encourage all of your employees to create LinkedIn profiles that link to it. Encouraging your employees to put effort in to creating strong profiles will pay off in at least two ways; you will look more attractive to prospective employees, and your current employees will become another source for leads.

If the perfect candidate finds you, wonderful; at the very least, you want your company to appear prominent and impressive to the people you contact once they start looking in to you.

Consistently work on Networking

If you only think about LinkedIn from time to time when you need to recruit, you won’t get much value out of it. The value of LinkedIn depends on the number and quality of your connections, and the way to build up a great network is to work on it all the time. You don’t want to spend all your time worrying about this, obviously, but making a LinkedIn connection part of your routine when meeting new people professionally goes a long way. Little things like putting a link to your profile in your email signature can also pay big dividends.

Make Use Of Advanced Search And Search Alerts

LinkedIn’s built-in advanced search is a powerful tool, allowing you to set a wide range of parameters. It’s well worth your time to take full advantage of it. Refining your search, finding the right degree of specificity to whittle down your results to a small group of quality leads is a much better use of your time than working your way through the long list returned by a basic keyword search.

Use Google To Search LinkedIn

While LinkedIn’s built-in advanced search is great for finding people in your extended network, Google is often the way to go for searching the wider community. Because many users keep a public profile viewable by anyone, a Google site search with the right parameters can turn up lots of hits, and is often more effective than LinkedIn’s own search.

Pick Up the Phone

LinkedIn is not an excuse to stop making recruiting calls. Using InMail and email to communicate with your contacts efficiently and generate leads is terrific. The new media revolution has made reaching out to someone electronically any less lame but when it comes to making new contacts, nothing beats the phone call.

Spam Your Network

How likely are you to take a close look at a message from a casual acquaintance with a history of sending you mass emails? This is a great resource for getting the word out far and wide when you have a major opening, but use it sparingly. Many recruiting experts are very enthusiastic about this technique, it’s important to bear in mind that as exciting as your employment opportunities may be to you, many of the people receiving your email will regard it as spam. That’s not to say you shouldn’t use this technique, but rather that it is most effective when used rarely. Think about how you work through your own email.

Using Middle-Men

The ability to search for second- and third-degree connections is what makes LinkedIn such a great tool, but that doesn’t mean you should be rushing to contact these people. Get connected in your extended network to identify the people in your immediate network that know the most promising prospects and reach out to them. Ask them about the names you came up with, and whether they know anyone else who might be a good fit. If you can get them to make introductions, terrific; at the very least, you can tell prospects that they were recommended by a mutual association. That is definitely better than saying you got their information on the Internet.

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