Internal HR or Recruitment Teams using LinkedIn for Recruitment

In many ways, LinkedIn is still best known for the recruitment side of its business – or perhaps, if I am keeping with the time, the Talent Acquisition side of its business. It is indeed the perfect tool for HR professionals and HR teams to build in to their recruitment processes, particularly if they are looking to move away from a sole reliance on agency recruiters and take back the control of this important process inhouse.

We looked at a number of different areas you can use to help recruit – the first elements will be to put the background / support pieces in place.

After that, there are three real streams that you should be able to tap into:

1. Proactive Search

Seek out the potential people on LinkedIn who have the skills, experience etc to fulfil the tasks of the role that you are looking for. This is essentially the role that an agency recruiter would have fulfilled for you with the end result of drawing up a short list for interview

We have gone through the search mechanisms that you can tap into but to recap, consider:

  • Advanced Search
  • Company focused search
  • Contacts of Industry contacts
  • Search within relevant LinkedIn Groups
  • Skills based search

You can also tap into the connections that you have within the company who in turn have connections in the industry that you can leverage. Use the “Connection of connections” search to check out the Connections of your people internally who are currently in a similar role or the Line Managers of these people.

2. Free Advertising / Job highlighting

Create a short Job advert – a graphic essentially – for the roles that you are looking for and start to push this out either via your own account (“Share an update” on the homepage) or via the Company Page.

In doing so, this goes out to your connections, which is a good start – however, make sure that the other members of the company in the same functional area as the role also click ‘like’ which will in turn disseminate it out to their connections and so get it out to the right people. NB. This second “liking” phase is important because without it you are reducing the reach of the advert quite considerably.

You can also start “Job Discussions” in relevant Groups on LinkedIn – find the Groups using the techniques we discussed the find the Group Job tab and post an Update there are before. Getting the right type of job in front of the right types of people hopefully.

3. Jobs Board

If using Updates amounts to a pull marketing approach then the Jobs Board is very much the “push marketing” side of the coin.