In our previous post, Finding Partners on LinkedIn, we continued our series with a discussion on how to find partners for your business on LinkedIn. In this post, we continue with a look at how to find and recruit talent on LinkedIn.
If you’re recruiting in the current economic downturn, you’re well aware of the perils of posting a job requisition on even a single online job board. The result is likely to be dozens or hundreds of resumes, many of which are not only not in the ballpark, but not even the same solar system as your requirements.
This growing deluge of eager jobseekers has accelerated an already growing trend in talent acquisition (AKA finding people to hire). More and more enterprises are de-emphasizing offline and online job posting and turning to social media sourcing, using social media sites such as LinkedIn to locate top candidates and invite them to apply, for free.
This new emphasis is akin to a fisherman changing from casting a wide net in hopes of catching a single prize fish to using sophisticated mapping and sonar to fish where the fish are.
LinkedIn is an ideal environment for finding those trophy fish.
If you’re an enterprise of some size and you’re serious about recruiting on LinkedIn, you can sign up for a LinkedIn Recruiter account. This type of account drastically improves your ability to search on LinkedIn, adds the ability to create alerts, gives you 50 InMails (ability to email anyone on LinkedIn) per month, and allows you to check references instantly. As part of their Talent Advantage program, LinkedIn also offers features such as employment ads, annual subscriptions for job listings, and customizable company profiles you can use to display different job information to LinkedIn members based on their profiles.
Be prepared to shell out some money for these features, however. Although details on cost are sketchy, it’s been reported that $29,800 is the minimum investment for the LinkedIn Talent Advantage Starter Package. You can go a bit cheaper by upgrading to one of LinkedIn’s regular paid accounts, which range from $24.95/month to $499.95/month, with discounts for buying a full year.
If you’re looking for talent, say so in your LinkedIn profile. Adding a simple line such as, “Looking for an outreach manager” or “Need a policy researcher,” or even adding, “hiring” to your professional headline can attract interest. Of course, we assume you’ve already described your business in other sections of your profile, so prospective applicants can learn more. This is often more effective than blind job postings, and is more likely to attract passive candidates — those who are not actively looking for a job.
If you’re trying to fill a position, let your connections know. One good way is to change your LinkedIn status, indicating what kind of candidate you’re looking for. Another good technique is to contact your connections, either through LinkedIn or via email, let them know about your talent search, and ask them to recommend people in their networks.
Most groups have an active Jobs section, where members post jobs and find jobs. It’s free for group members to list a job in these sections.
You may have noticed there’s a Jobs link on the LinkedIn toolbar. You can post jobs on LinkedIn, but it will cost you $195 for a 30-day posting, or you can save up to 40 percent with a multi-job pack.
All of these ideas, however, share one thing in common: They’re very similar to the post-your-job-and-hope model of talent acquisition by casting a wide net.
One of the advantages of LinkedIn is that you can find out lots about other members from their public profiles. So to find those passive candidates, or to avoid getting inundated with resumes due to public job posts, use the techniques discussed in the previous section to find candidates to invite to apply for your openings.
In fact, you may find a passive candidate may be a better choice than one who is actively looking. A LinkedIn poll found that 60 percent of employers said that passive candidates made better employees. If you believe, as unfortunately many do, that the best talent is always employed, then you can understand these poll results.
These 24 folks are likely to be not only highly experienced but, ahem, come highly recommended.
One technique you might use with LinkedIn involves scraping the results of searches right into Microsoft Excel. Using Mozenda, a versatile screen scraper that starts at $99/month, you can run the LinkedIn people search and have results exported as a CSV or Excel file. Of course, since free LinkedIn accounts only return 100 name results per search, this is another incentive to upgrade to one of the premium accounts and get 300, 500, or 700 results per search.
Next up: Who is on LinkedIn?
“If you’re looking to gauge brands’ engagement with digital media, look no further than the automotive industry. Here’s why.
In our previous post, Building Relationships on LinkedIn, we continued our series with a discussion on how to build better relationships and connect with those in your space. In this post, we continue with a look at how to find partners for your business on LinkedIn.
Some rights reserved by Kory C.
If you’re ready to find a partner — for a joint venture, for creating an event, or to form a new venture — you may find the experience is a lot like dating: Kiss a lot of frogs, and hope to get lucky. That’s partly because meeting with a new potential partner is like a blind date. You know a little about each other, and may have some friends in common, but you don’t have a relationship yet.
Well, there are more than more than 100 million frogs to kiss on LinkedIn, but one advantage of using the site is that you can get to know a lot more about your blind date before committing to dance with them.
This last attribute is very useful in finding members who are interested in making deals, and the seniority level attribute lets you search for decision makers.
Unfortunately, to use this and the other search attributes in the above list, you must upgrade from the free membership to at least the $24.95 a month Business level. But if you’re serious about making a deal with a partner, it’s not much money, and you can cancel at any time. Plus you get more InMails (ability to message random people to whom you are not connected) and search results limited to 300 instead of 100 items.
Even if you don’t upgrade, you can use the advanced search to zero in on potential partners, or better still, use Google to search LinkedIn.
The “site:” modifier restricts the Google search to pages on the target site, in this case, LinkedIn. The plus sign means the keyword is required. In this case, both “CEO” and the phrase “medical device” are required. There are lots of other modifiers you can use with advanced Google searching as well. Remember, however, Google search is limited to LinkedIn members’ public profiles, while the internal search looks at all member information.
Now that you have your candidate list, prioritize it based on the Google results and start visiting their profiles. Be sure to note the LinkedIn Groups the candidates belong to; you may want to join those groups so you can contact them. Also note whether you have second- or third-level connections who may be able to introduce you.
Once you’ve got a short list, be sure to Google each candidate and visit any relevant Websites you discover.
There are many advantages to joining LinkedIn Groups. The most relevant one here is that you can privately or publicly message other group members. You can also use your group membership as a reason to send a connection request. So join the groups your short-listed candidates belong to, and start forging a relationship with them.
You also may want your current connections to connect you. We talk more about this manner of getting connected in the upcoming post Three Degrees of LinkedIn.
We recommend only trying to connect to second level contacts this way (friends of your friends). The positive effect of an introduction can be lessened with third level contacts (friends of your friends’ friends).
Once you’re connected, let the relationship begin! Here’s hoping you get lucky!
It’s the middle of the end for print . . .
In our previous post, Prospecting for Customers on LinkedIn, we continued our series with a discussion on how to locate customers on LinkedIn. In this post, we continue with a look at how to build better relationships and connect with those in your space.
Here are some steps you can take to build a relationship with an individual or an organization via LinkedIn.
Look them up on LinkedIn — Once you’ve identified the prospective contact, do a People Search on LinkedIn by simply typing their name in the search box at the top of any LinkedIn page. If you find them, go to their profile page. See what groups they belong to, or if anyone you know can introduce you. There’s more on getting introduced in the upcoming post Three Degrees of LinkedIn.
Join the groups they are in — LinkedIn Groups are a great way to get to know people. There are thousands of groups, and most are open for anyone to join. By joining a group you can find out more about your target person, and even directly contact them via LinkedIn.
See if they’ve posted in the group discussions — If so, start by commenting on the post item. If they’ve posted a lot, keep commenting on what they say for a few posts, then send them a private message (using the Reply Privately link shown at the end of the post) asking them a question about what they said.
Try to engage them in a conversation — Once you’ve established a bit of a relationship, send your target a connection request, mentioning your common group membership and any discussions you’ve had. Do not just send the default invite; personalize it and give them a good reason to accept. There’s lots more about connection requests in the upcoming post Finding People to Invite.
Once you are connected — Download their vCard. A vCard is a contact information file in a standard format that most email programs can import. The vCard icon on LinkedIn is easy to miss. It’s located at the bottom of the first main box on a connection’s profile and it looks like the following figure. The vCard is likely to include their email address and not much else.
Email them — Periodically (don’t spam) email your contact with a bit of news or other information that they will be interested in, and ask for their comments.
Watch their activity — The various activities that your connections take on LinkedIn show up on your LinkedIn main page in a timeline. If a connection changes their profile, changes their status, or joins a group, a notice appears on your LinkedIn home page. You can comment on these events and activities as appropriate and build your relationship with them.
Ask when the time is right — Only after you’ve established a deep-enough relationship with your new connection should you start discussing the reason you wanted to know them. Exactly when and how to do this is something you’ll have to figure out for yourself. Put yourself in their position: If they asked you to take an action, would you?