Last update:
LinkedIn is a great database of candidates; only in France 20 million people now have a LinkedIn account. And so this is a great opportunity for you recruiters.
But do you know how to find those talents that interest you? Do you know best research and sourcing practices? What about the best approach strategy? Yes, these candidates that interest you are most often passive candidates, they are not currently actively looking for a position.
Some ideas to get you hungry, some really essential techniques we think:
- Use the advanced search engine, do not limit yourself to the search box that appears permanently in the top menu bar.
- Use Boolean operators, to better target your search, in free fields you can put occurrences AND, OR, NOT and (). Example: (Director OR Director) AND (Commercial OR Commercial)
- Exploit all the 16 search criteria only LinkedIn makes available even in free mode.
- Use LinkedIn's paid accounts, tools like Sales Navigator which allows to further refine targets by numbers of people in target societies
- Take care of your approach messages, send messages to the candidate and not just to your own goals! The candidate is first and foremost interested in his or her career, before looking at the perspectives you can offer him or her. So avoid "I introduce myself, blablablabla, so we have to be put in touch" But "I see we have X contacts in common..."
- Make content that enters into the sphere of appetence of your targets.
- Example: Target: WEB Developer, - Talk about your latest achievements by thanking your web development teams - Or if you are a recruitment company: talk about developers' exploits in a startup and ask the community for advice. The aim of these contents is to capture attention and to make them react. The content "type of job announcement" will be produced in parallel. And yes, social media is not just promotional information!
Author: Matthieu Valin