RecRuitment online professional networks

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RecRuitment passive candidates

HR professionals have likely been using professional networking sites such as LinkedIn for several years, primarily as a

networking tool, and also possibly to engage with colleagues. Increasingly, however, it’s being used as a recruitment tool. This is also nothing new – professional recruiters have counted LinkedIn as perhaps the most valuable tool in their armoury for some time.

For those not yet ‘in the know’, how can LinkedIn be used to optimum effect?

Steve Barham, director, Australia & New Zealand, LinkedIn Hiring Solutions, says that one of the company’s three business lines – LinkedIn Hiring Solutions – is dedicated to helping employers find specialised passive candidates.

The flagship product in this line is called LinkedIn Recruiter. This product, which launched in Australia in April 2010, gives employers the ability to search across the entire LinkedIn membership network (over 70 million professionals). It allows their team to collaborate on an enterprise platform, which looks quite different to the LinkedIn site that everyday users see. The teams can build projects – through which they can easily pipeline candidates – as well as collaborate with colleagues, and set up search alerts. For example, when a new Java Developer joins LinkedIn in Sydney, the team is alerted immediately. It also provides the ability

Advocates of LinkedIn as a recruitment tool call it the ‘desert island solution’ – the one sourcing tool they would need if stranded on an island. While it’s taken off overseas, Australian recruiters and HR

to reach out to all those members on LinkedIn via an in-mail. This protects confidential contact information for LinkedIn members, but also allows an employer or recruiter to contact anyone who is a perfect fit for a job opportunity.

A second solution is the Jobs Network. Barham says employers are finding it useful to post their openings to LinkedIn. “We’re not a job board but we do have tens of thousands of job postings,” he says. “The unique advantage of putting a job posting onto LinkedIn is that it’s really the only place where you can post a job opening and have it viewed by passive candidates. If they’re on a job board, they’re one of the 5–10% of the workforce that is either out of

a job or wants a different job. Posting a job to a job board is only going to attract that audience.”

Job postings can be matched to best fit the members, so when a user logs onto their LinkedIn homepage that day they’ll be presented with

the three best job opportunities that fit their profile.The third portfolio of solutions encompasses

employment branding. Companies can create a careers page, which is essentially their portal within the LinkedIn community. They can talk about their EVP, create polls, have links to their other social media sites, and they can also host video. “It can also be targeted to different audiences so you can have different content being viewed depending on whether that candidate is a sales person, IT professional, or whatever,” says Barham.

Targeted advertising can also be used to get a brand or key message out.

n 63% of FORTUNE 100 companies in the US are using LinkedIn Hiring Solutions to attract talent

professionals are just starting to realise its value

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RecRuitment passive candidates

Of course, while all of this costs money, Barham remains optimistic that local employers will be keen to sample at least some of these options. “There’s no such thing as a standard offering,” he says. “For pricing we work directly with each employer and recruiting organisation to create a solution that’s right for them. It’s not one-size-fits-all.”

Changing the way we recruitUnsurprisingly, Barham believes LinkedIn has changed recruitment forever. “Employers need to look beyond just posting on job boards and in print,” he says. “LinkedIn enables sourcing teams to be more proactive, to do the jobs they were hired to do – to find the right talent. Previously they didn’t have that capability – they would either have to post and pray, and wait for a good enough candidate to respond, or rely on external agencies which can be quite cost prohibitive.”

The search capability of LinkedIn is directly tied to the robust, comprehensive profiles that users are creating every day. “These profiles list their roles, specialties, the experiences they’ve had – even more so than you might find on a traditional resume. So you’re able to search across all that information on Recruiter, and stack it one on top of the other to narrow the 70 million down to the 12 who are your perfect target in little over a minute,” says Barham.

Where does this place recruitment agencies? Are they out of business? It’s a question Barham is often asked. “My response is that recruiting agencies have been using LinkedIn for years – they’ve found it the most powerful tool in their arsenal as well. It’s a rich landscape of candidates for recruiters to engage with. With 70 million members, there’s plenty of fish in the sea for recruiters as well as employers. If recruiters can offer their clients a widely sourced selection of candidates it works for them, too,” he says.

Also handy for…Barham also sees the division between social networking and professional networking widening as time goes on, and he believes people join LinkedIn for very different reasons to why they’ll join other social networks.

“They join LinkedIn to manage their professional brand,” he says. “What the world has now come to realise is that whether it’s a potential employer, a potential client, people evaluating whether they want to come work for you, or anyone who’s about to meet you for business purposes, they’ll all do a quick check to find out more about you. The de-facto

Cherie Curtis, head of psychology at Onetest, provides some insights into online/social media recruitment.

Social media provides two great opportunities:1. It improves the scope and quality of applicant pools by extending

the geographical reach of recruitment activities, allowing recruiters to effortlessly reach candidates both nationally and internationally.

2. It allows employers to improve brand awareness and employment marketing reach. As a result, we can expect to see increasingly transient workforce coming from non-traditional markets – for example, candidates from rural areas and overseas applying for positions in different regions.

Social media also changes the scope of the candidate pool: • It allows for more people to be ‘passively’ reviewing other opportunities

while still employed. This highlights the importance of ensuring a positive and consistent brand image is maintained and current employees are treated well at all times, as it will be increasingly easy for people to ‘jump ship’ as they hear about other opportunities, even when not actively job seeking.

• Employee engagement is therefore more important than ever. As a recruiter this means that you should also be considering ongoing passive sourcing so that every opportunity to source potential talent is optimised. However, in order for social recruitment to be successful, HR will need

to work closely with marketing departments to effectively leverage the opportunity that social media channels provides. It is important to be mindful that these channels are very different to traditional channels and some ‘out of the box’ thinking is required to be successful.

Also be mindful of not intruding on people’s personal space – Onetest’s 2009 Graduate survey identified a degree of concern amongst some graduates that the overuse of social recruitment marketing could intrude on their personal space. One specific comment summarises this well: “Employers need to recognise that MySpace is ‘my’ space, not ‘YourSpace’.”

Engage – but use discretion

place for that professional research to happen is your LinkedIn profile.”

HR professionals are not only networking and finding talent using LinkedIn but they’re also building communities using LinkedIn groups. Company profiles can be used to create forums for existing employees. In addition, it’s also possible to create alumni groups, which are a handy way to keep up relationships with former employees. Hc

Additional information on how to utilise LinkedIn more effectively can be found at http://talent.linkedin.com