Perspectives & Strategy

With the range of social media tools available combined with the wealth of information that active members do provide on-line it is surprising that more hiring managers do not turn to social media channels for all of their recruiting needs.

LinkedIn’s sign-up page talks about powering your career, specifically “discover inside connections when you’re looking for a job or new business opportunity”. The site’s power comes from an ability to connect people having common goals. It is about building a professional network on-line and leveraging for many aspects of business. Looking specifically at LinkedIn there are several job boards on the site ranging from the main job site where posts are paid for to the groups where members of the group can post a job at no cost.

Paid postings will be viewable by anyone performing a job search with matching criteria and can even be configured to appear in a column on the user’s main page. Potentially viewable by any of the 50 million plus members. Costs here are comparable to posting on specialist job sites like JobServe or Monster. Groups are arguably a better alternative in that posts are free, they are also more focused. The problem is that there may be twenty or thirty groups that may be relevant and to your target audience and you need to be a member of the group in which the job posting is placed.

Posts on the group also rely on the member having the right notification settings in-place, but the active job hunter is more likely to be paying attention to these openings than others, the advantage of group job posts is that they are free. One potential disadvantage is that the poster has to be a member of the group. It is recognised that many hiring managers have different interests to their employees and therefore other than for hiring will not be interested in group activity. There is nothing stopping the manager joining that group temporarily then leaving once they have a set of likely candidates.

LinkedIn is a very powerful site for professional networking. As such It does not matter whether you are a hiring manager, a job-seeker, or simply using It to make business connections, LinkedIn should be used in a similar fashion.

The first challenge is always finding a potential candidate. For this LinkedIn has very good search capabilities. It should be possible to find a large pool of people with the right background. It is best advised to start with broader criteria than narrow requirements. For example use the term ‘CRM’ rather than the name of a specific software package when looking for a CRM Analyst. Once you have a pool of potential candidates then take a look at their profiles. You may be surprised at the number of first level connections you have that already fit your criteria. These are the easiest to contact because you already have access to their full email contact details through your personal connections, and generally speaking It is best to make the approach via email rather than LinkedIn’s internal message system as sadly many users do not always pay attention to the LinkedIn internal notifications.

If you know the person remind them where from. Many of the connections come about because of social media activity in the past and It is possible to have forgotten the reason why you connected two years ago. Here It is important to stress that you are connected on LinkedIn as most people are willing to talk to those they are connected to; it is one of the reasons we like to connect in the first place.

When people are second or third level connections it is not always possible to send them a direct message through LinkedIn, unless you have a premium account. The way to connect is via another person, and the better you trust the intermediary the more likely they are to pass on your request, and do that quickly. If they know the third person well they may be prepared to facilitate an introduction face-to-face or via email. Beware that you may be connected to the prospective employee only via their existing manager, who is a part of your network – not the best connection point to the perspective employee.

LinkedIn can also be used in many ways to identify potential candidates. Once specific people have been identified It is important to find out more about them and gain further insights about their suitability for the role in question. Their activity on LinkedIn Answers, and their activity in the groups they belong to may speak volumes about them.

LinkedIn Answers is a great way of connecting with some potential candidates. One suggestion is to pose a question that is linked to a real life scenario the successful applicant would face in their job. Look at each of the replies and communicate with people. It is true that not all answers you receive will be relevant, but those that are provide an opportunity for opening up a dialogue – tell them that you are currently seeking to hire someone into a role where this scenario represents one of the key challenges. They may be able to recommend someone for the role, or be interested themselves. It is important not to think about where people are located as often people on the other side of the planet have local connections or they may be an expatriate wishing to return home.

In conclusion this article may indicate that there is work for a hiring manager to complete in order to find good quality candidates, but through LinkedIn it is possible to identify people without spending anything but time; and that will please the accountant.

Is it a job that can be handed off to HR? As a hiring manager I have always advocated that HR have no involvement in the recruitment process; they simply do not possess the skills necessary to decide whether any individual has the right technical knowledge for the job; and certainly should not be allowed to pre-screen candidates. They may need to be involved at some stage, but may have problems with unconventional routes to finding candidates. If you do hand off this process to anyone then you should involve a person the new recruit would work closely with once they are employed.