Today social networking sites have a key role to play in recruitment industry. They are well regarded as effective recruitment tools for they have changed the way recruitment takes place. Linkedin is one such site which has made the lives of recruiters easier.

What is Linkedin?

Linkedin is a professional networking site that connects professionals from around the world, representing 170 industries and 200 countries, and where they can find, be introduced to, and collaborate with other qualified professionals that they need to work with to accomplish their professional goals.

How does Linkedin work?

According to the site, when you join Linkedin, you create a profile that summarizes your professional expertise and accomplishments. You can then form enduring connections by inviting trusted contacts to join LinkedIn and connect to you. Your network consists of your connections, your connections’ connections, and the people they know, linking you to a vast number of qualified professionals and experts. Through your network you can:

* Manage the information that’s publicly available about you as professional
* Find and be introduced to potential clients, service providers, and subject experts who come recommended
* Create and collaborate on projects, gather data, share files and solve problems
* Be found for business opportunities and find potential partners
* Gain new insights from discussions with likeminded professionals in private group settings
* Discover inside connections that can help you land jobs and close deals
* Post and distribute job listings to find the best talent for your company

How do you get started?

Creating a good Profile

The foremost aspect that represents you on Linkedin is your profile. Your profile is the single most important differentiator between you and other recruiters. Keep the following points in your mind while creating your profile:

* Make sure that you include who you are and what you do, your education background and professional experience in your Linkedin profile
* Update the kind of position that you work as and the type of companies that you represent
* Share your contact details including your mail id and contact number so that people can easily approach you

Building Contacts

* Once your profile is ready, the next step in line is to build contacts, which enables you to reach more people and improves your visibility:
* Import your address book from your internet mail accounts or your outlook ,find who all are there and invite them
* If you have a database of candidates or clients with their mail ids, make sure that you upload it on your Linkedin account to add them as your Linkedin connections
* Keep adding every candidate, whom you get to know constantly on Linkedin. This will help you in continuous increase of your connections

Getting Recommended

Recommendation is another feature in Linkedin where you get recommended from your connections for the work that you did or do:

* Once your profile is ready and contacts lists have started building up, you need to make sure that your peers at work, your candidates and your clients recommend you
* Linkedin also provides a link to ask them for recommendations. Don’t forget or be reluctant to use the feature.

Sourcing the Profiles

Having done the necessary groundwork, you are now all set to utilize Linkedin to its maximum potential. So, let us move onto the guidelines for using the free tools available on Linkedin to source profiles:


1. Keep updating

* Keep updating your status with the hottest requirement that you have. This allows people in your network to know the requirements that you have at present
* You never know that the right candidate might be someone you already know or someone who is in your network

2. Search for Linkedin groups

* Search for groups which are relevant to what and whom you are looking for; identify them by company name, industry etc.
* There are two important things that you can do with these groups viz. posting jobs in these groups and directly mailing to group members
* Do not choose groups by size, but by your needs at present
* Make sure that you remove groups or leave groups which are not of your use, since Linkedin limits you to only 50 communities

3. Question and Answers

* Keep asking questions to all your connections. It is a good practice as the questions are widely read by their connections
* For instance, you can ask questions like “I am looking for a Java developer from Internet domain, can you refer me anyone?” Or say “I am hiring Java developers, can you help me in finding one or can you suggest me companies where I can get java developers from banking domain?”
* You can certainly get a good candidate or a matching profile from the responses you get for these questions

4. Searching people

This is an important feature that you can use to search people through Linkedin.

* Focus on simple keywords like company name or designation or say, Java if you are looking for Java developer. The result might be wide but are useful. To filter the results, you can use location criteria
* Once you know that you have found the right profile, you can directly connect with the person if he/she is in your first level of connections
* For those profiles in the second and third level the best thing that you can do is to get the contact details from your first level connections
* When all of these do not work, look for what groups is the person, you want to contact, member of. You can also mail him if you belong to the same community.
* Another effective way to do this is to search their names on job portals using previous companies name as combination. By doing so, you might get his email id or contact number and bring them in.
* If you still don’t find a way to reach the person, better call his company board line and ask to connect.

Using all of these features regularly pays you in dividends by generating lots of passive candidates.

The Outlook

* With my experience in using Linkedin, I have found that most of the profiles which I usually get are unique, passive and are definitely the perfect fit for me.
* I was approached by some people, who incidentally saw my Linkedin profile and who needed my services to get them the right job.
* There are many talented recruiters out there, but it’s a matter of your importance and credibility that people start knowing you as a right person to approach, when they hunt jobs.

Things to be pondered- A word of advice

Some factors that you should always keep in your mind while using Linkedin:

* Maintain strict formal relationships
* Use words carefully and judiciously
* Make people feel that their privacies are duly respected.

All of these would make your networking effects last long.
I hope that you find the knowledge that I shared useful. I am sure that there might be many more ways to use Linkedin as well. But I leave that for you to find them. Any feedback or additions to mine are always welcome.

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