Recruiting on LinkedIn

I am doing some research and reviewing some great training material from Link Humans regarding "How to Recruit on LinkedIn" and I would like to hear what some of your best practices are with using LinkedIn as a Recruiter.

In the article it states that the ratio for success is 1/5 Promotion and the rest helpful and useful content. I try not to "SPAM" out Job posting after Job posting but when I have a really "Hot" Job I may post it 2 times in one day. Is this annoying? I do not want my connections to get annoyed and remove my content altogether.

I am also interested in hearing how many of you have "premium" accounts and pay for the service monthly. I haven't upgraded my account and I am not to sure how I feel about paying for the service as I get the majority of my candidates from other sources. Would it increase my chances to find that "Purple Tailed Rainbow Maned Unicorn"?

One last thing, how do you all feel about the ability to see who has been looking at your profile? I have this one person who views my profile every other day in the middle of the night like 2:30am........I feel like I want to call this person and ask if there is something I can help them with.

▶ Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Dane Anar on May 3, 2013 at 3:48pm

I use LinkedIn for probably 90% of all my recruiting efforts - it's a great tool and I'd be lost with out. But then again, I might actually venture outside once in awhile haha.

I use an aggregator such as Bullhorn Reach that posts all my jobs that I post on BR to my social feeds such as twitter/facebook/linkedin at the occurrences that I specify, along with job boards such as simplyhired and indeed.

I pay for a premium account just so I have the following:

inmails
the premium badge
openlink badge
view more candidates then just 100 (you'd be surprised at how little 100 can be)

I love knowing who's stalking me. As a LION, If I see someone stalking my profile that I haven't connected with already, I will connect with them and ask how I can help them.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Elizabeth on May 3, 2013 at 6:49pm

Thank you Dane! Any suggestions for me as I do not pay for premium service? What is a LION? Do you also pay for service through Monster and Dice?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Derdiver on May 3, 2013 at 7:13pm

LION= Linked In Open Networker. They don't use that term any more though. It was saying that you would accept anyone who wanted to link with you. You don't really need the paid service although it is easier with one. Once you found someone you can look them up on other social sites and get messages to them that way or ask for an invitation. Other paid services are good but it depends on what you are looking for.

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Dane Anar on May 3, 2013 at 7:23pm

Monster is a paid service - it's expensive and they're being bought out (rumor has it) and aren't the best job board on the market right now. Dice is also a paid service and I'm fortunate enough to work for a company that pays for all these services yearly.

My best piece of advice - learn to manipulate search engines. (Boolean searching)

Elizabeth said:

Thank you Dane! Any suggestions for me as I do not pay for premium service? What is a LION? Do you also pay for service through Monster and Dice?

▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Sarah Calverley on May 9, 2013 at 12:50am

HI Elizabeth. I would suggest broadening your search skills to operate mainly outside of Linkedin (such as Boolean). I find Linkedin's value proposition to recruitment agency is becoming less and less, well, valuable.

In general with social media sharing they suggest 1/5 ratio of updates with 1 being promotion and the rest other content, but I have found 1/3 is perfectly fine and I don't get many unfollows following this ratio.

I enjoy the challenge of finding other meaningful ways to connect with people apart from paying for a Linkedin premium account and whilst I have used and tested just about all the accounts they have available I have always been able to operate effectively on a basic (free) account.

Not being able to see the people who always look at you can be annoying but only if you let it bother you. It is actually a way that Linkedin encourages upgrades and therefore is probably something they are withholding rather than it being a setting on the users side. If you click on the title "someone in HR" or whatever short description is there, the first page of results will yield the person who looked at you, it normally doesn't take too much guessing to figure it out from there.

Hopefully this helps and my explanation makes sense! Good luck :)