- One of the strongest recruiting tools today is LinkedIn. With approximately 45 million LinkedIn profiles viewed each day, it’s not surprising that recruiters have tapped into this rich resource as a prime source for attracting new candidates and clients.
In today’s recruiting landscape, LinkedIn isn’t optional – it’s a mandatory recruiting tool for your business, and if you’re not an active participant you will get left behind.
When it comes to harnessing LinkedIn for your recruiting business, you and your recruiters can employ some simple strategies to build your brands, promote your company, and recruit talent for successful placements with your clients.
Here is the actionable advice you need to get LinkedIn working for your brand:
1. Build Recruiter’s Personal Brands
Today’s recruiters must think and act like marketers to develop their brand and attract the right candidates based on their reputation in the industry. LinkedIn is an essential tool for branding, and it all begins with these personal profile must-haves:
- Attention-grabbing headlines and professional summaries
- Links to your firm and your other social networks
- Professional profile photos
- Recommendations from other users
- Detailed descriptions of their certifications, credentials, and skills
As CEO, it’s your job to provide your recruiters with the resources they need to build strong personal profile pages that are the first step in harnessing the power of LinkedIn as a recruiting tool.
2. Measure Their Success
Once a recruiter has established a presence on LinkedIn, they can start to pay attention to what happens next. Simply creating a profile and walking away won’t cut it if you want your team to dig deeper and turn their pages into powerful recruiting resources.
One of LinkedIn’s strongest assets is the access to data-rich analytics. What can be measured can be changed, so understanding the importance of metrics is the first step in your recruiters leveraging their profile pages for attracting candidates.
Setting benchmarks measuring who has viewed a recruiter’s personal profile, their stats for successful placements, or the number of new candidates attracted allows you to determine if your business is growing and at what rate.
Encourage your recruiters to create growth targets for themselves to gain the most benefit of maintaining their pages and increasing their networks.
3. Build Your Company Brand
In the same way recruiters need to market themselves on LinkedIn, CEOs need to market their business as an umbrella for your recruiters' personal brands.
Just as your recruiters did for their personal pages, your company needs its own page with the following goals in mind:
- Addressing your target audience of job seekers and clients
- Highlight your firm’s specialties and areas of expertise
- Attracting followers to engage with your brand through meaningful content and social posts
A dedicated member of your recruiting team with a strong grasp on data and analytics should be responsible for measuring the success of your company profile page based on the number of followers, user engagement, posts viewed, and new leads.
In addition, your analytics will give you invaluable insights into your competitors' performance and demographic data on your followers. These metrics are critical to maximizing LinkedIn as an impactful tool for your recruiting business.
4. Engage Candidates Through Recruiter’s Personal Pages
Setting up a personal LinkedIn profile page is an important step in your recruiter’s branding process, but it doesn’t end after a page is published. That’s just the beginning.
For your recruiters to connect with their followers they must nurture those relationships as established leaders through status updates on their personal profile pages.
There are two main candidate engagement streams for your recruiters to pay close attention to on LinkedIn:
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Balanced Content
Status updates allow your recruiters to make themselves known as thought leaders in the industry, focusing on the sectors they specialize in.
This means regularly posting relevant articles and other informed content for followers to read and add to their knowledge base.
Content should be multi-dimensional and appeal to candidate’s different styles of learning and taking in new information. Posts with images, video content, infographics, and uploads of presentation slides are examples of strong and engaging content that they can share with their followers.
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Interaction with Connections
Social media is designed to be exactly that: social. Posting updates without engaging other users means that your recruiters aren’t taking full advantage of the potential for candidate connections.
Encouraging your recruiters to engage with their networks will go a long way in creating dialogues about industry-specific information establishing a strong presence as an expert on those topics.
For your recruiters, this means tagging specific followers or candidates in their status updates to target specific groups based on content.
This shows candidates that your recruiters have them in mind when they read and share industry information, makes candidates feel valued, and makes your recruiters memorable in candidates’ minds when it comes time for them to seek a new position.
5. Build Your Firm’s Presence Through Company Status Updates
Company status updates are a huge opportunity to give your firm a foundation for building a brand presence in the recruiting sector.
The possibilities for the type of content you can post on your firm’s LinkedIn page are endless.
Encouraging your users to like and support your content, turn to your company page administrator to post content using the following guidelines for successful posts:
- Get targeted – Address your key candidate groups directly through content that appeals to their interests
- Employ multiple media channels – Video, image-rich posts, presentation slides, and videos
- Post regularly with content that speaks to each of your firm’s target groups
- Utilize your existing content – Rely on your company newsletters, blog posts, and social media feeds to repurpose posts for your LinkedIn audience
- Keep it fresh – Mix it up with different types of content, ranging from articles to company promotion pieces to reporting on relevant industry trends
- Make it digital-friendly – Shorter posts that are succinct and to the point
- Focus on setting your posts apart from your competitors by studying their pages and avoiding duplicate content
Now that your recruiters and your company have rock-solid profile pages that are content-rich and engage your audience… it’s time to start recruiting.
6. Evaluate the Market
LinkedIn is a hotbed of passive candidates who are gainfully employed but approachable when it comes to discussing new job opportunities.
According to LinkedIn data, 85% of the professionals on their network are approachable, meaning that they are willing to hear from you about relevant openings, even if they are not actively seeking work.
7. Get Schooled in Searches
Your recruiters must master the art of performing the perfect search. When seeking out candidates, your recruiters should know how to use simple search functions to either broaden, narrow, or advance your search using different parameters.
Advanced searches allow you to benefit from your own network, save your searches, and join dedicated groups that target the demographic you’re looking for.
8. Grow Your Talent Pool
Your talent pool is a group of warm candidates that are primed and ready to go. Having a tight talent group to draw from saves you from reinventing the wheel with each search and keeps relevant candidates at your recruiters' fingertips.
Having access to better quality candidates allows your recruiters to prioritize spending time on a focused group. This lets them respect the candidate’s time while staying visible and accessible to job seekers within that core group.
8. Master In-Mail Techniques
After your recruiters have found groups of candidates, they can engage through direct contact. Use these guidelines to harness the power of reaching out to candidates on a one-on-one basis:
- Get their attention – Explain why you reached out to them specifically.
- Demonstrate exclusivity – Show them why they appeal to your firm.
- Keep your tone conversational – Brief and friendly messages are the most well-received.
- Listen – Find out what their areas of interest are.
- Speak about the opportunity - Avoid re-posting the job description – Candidates are already familiar with your offerings or can find details on your company page. This is your chance for authentic engagement, not talking shop.
- Practice good timing – Weekends are not ideal for individual reach-out. Plan on weekday morning for the best results.
- Exercise patience – Being pushy will detract candidates from future interaction with your recruiters.
- Include a call to action – Be very clear in how the next steps are, and whose court the ball is in.
- Test your outreach – It will take your recruiters some practice and finessing to hone their LinkedIn in-mail technique. Testing different strategies in a methodical way allows your recruiters to see what works for them and change what isn’t fruitful.
10. Create a Brilliant Job Description
Every recruiter in your firm knows that there’s more to a great job description than listing the duties and expectations. To attract the best prospects to your postings, the art is in the details:
- Use a practical title and save creativity for the description
- Use a conversational tone for the best readability
- Highlight the impact that the position will have on your organization and the industry as a whole
- Make it mobile friendly!
11. Post and Promote to Targeted Candidates
A great post is useless if you don’t get it in front of the right candidates. To have your job opportunities viewed by the best talent, your recruiters must follow up with the top search matches, target their outreach through their search parameters, and amplify the reach of your jobs through social media channels.
The more focused, high-quality candidates who see your postings, the more successful your firm will be at using LinkedIn for making successful placements.
12. Measure Your Firm’s Success
Monitoring your job's activity gives your recruiters powerful insights into important information that will shape the way your recruiters use LinkedIn in the future. With focused analytics, you can learn:
- Who is interacting with your postings?
- How are they discovering your opportunities?
- When are they interacting with your posts?
- Who has viewed your recruiters' personal profiles after exploring a job post?
13. Create New Leads
Your next great placement is right around the corner – your recruiters just need to know where to find them. A good recruiter isn’t content to rest on their success when they can be in constant search of new leads, both for clients and candidates.
Career pages, accessing alumni pages, using search alerts, and noting who has viewed your recruiters' profiles are all great places to start in locating new business for your firm, all within the resources of the LinkedIn platform.
LinkedIn As a Powerful Recruitment Resource
More than a simple social media channel, LinkedIn is an invaluable wealth of information for recruiters and candidates alike.
Bridge professional connections and job opportunities by creating a forum for engaging with candidates and showcasing your recruiters' strengths within the job placement industry.
When your recruiting team can focus their efforts on targeting core groups within the LinkedIn talent pool, the possibilities for job-candidate matches are limitless.
Tracker RMS
Coupled with Tracker RMS recruitment agency software, LinkedIn will become one of your firm’s most valuable tools for sourcing talent and matching candidates with opportunities. Get in touch with us online to learn more about integrating our recruitment software into your firm’s strategic plan for pairing prospects with postings and seeing success in every match.
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