Top 5 Reasons for using LinkedIn from a corporate recruiter perspective

Following on from last week's blog about Facebook, Emma at Sky asked for some feedback from her team on how her corporate recruiters use LinkedIn.  These are the top five reasons they gave:

1. For all the reasons an agency recruiter would - LinkedIn gives you access to candidates’ "CV" details upfront so you can assess suitability before you brief them, it’s a great way of exploiting your professional network to pipeline talent, tells you whether someone is actively looking for work via the “Interested in” functionality, and gives you a built-in method of approach beyond the cold headhunting call via the “send message” function.

2. It’s purely professional – unlike other social media, LinkedIn users expect to be approached about networking and are there explicitly for that purpose. When companies get into hot water using social media it’s often because people don’t feel it’s an appropriate media choice for the approach – see the “Ernst and Young group is for hacks and tools” group on Facebook, for instance.
3. It enables you to exploit the unparalleled access you have to your hiring managers – as an in-house recruiter, connecting to and viewing the networks of your hiring managers is a great way of sourcing without relying on the manager/their teams to tell you about contacts who may be suitable.

4. From a personal career perspective - most business people agree that it is important to network and to keep in touch with people that could be useful in the future. However, given we are all very busy any means of achieving this needs to be quick, easy and pretty zero cost. It also needs to be relatively discrete and a network which if your boss found you registered on it, the would not automatically assume you were seeking to leave. It also needs to be credible and well established so people are prepared to join when invited. LinkedIn fulfils all the above criteria.

5. From a headhunter/internal recruiter perspective - this group needs a cheap or free tool to keep in touch with relatively inactive or passive candidates. It needs again to be credible, not company specific and not require any contact to submit a CV which they may be reluctant to do. It also needs to be searchable with discussion groups for specific topics and something that can be cumulative so you can on occasions help others as well as be helped. Linked In fulfils that criteria.

Coming soon (when I get the time) the top 5 reasons for using LinkedIn from a agency recruiter perspective (any contributors....?).  Finally, more on LinkedIn from Matt Alder here and here.

Comments

[Julius]

Thanks Louise for pushing recruiters toward Linkedin.

As a job hunter on Linkedin, I stumble upon recruiters that always end up asking for the canonical .doc CV.

Linkedin interactivity is great and I feel much more at ease completing Linkedin than writing a piece of paper than sometimes is really not enough.

Julius