LinkedIn is great for online networking and making business connections. If you are engaged in the recruitment process and aren’t fully utilizing your LinkedIn, then you should be, especially if looking to hire into a technical role, from mechanical maintenance managers to technical sales engineers. While you should be updating your LinkedIn all year round, the business networking slash social media site should have particular attention paid to it just before you start the technical recruitment process. It is a great tool to have in your arsenal, and using it (not exclusively but as part of your thorough ‘recruitment mix’) means that you are less likely to leave any stones unturned in your quest to find the perfect candidate. The vast majority of people use LinkedIn to position themselves and look for the next potential career opportunities, but those who are in the business of recruiting realize its potential as a recruiting tool.
Establish a Brand Presence
Not only should you always ensure you have the correct and most up-to-date information on your organization’s LinkedIn profile, but also on your own personal LinkedIn profile (linked to your organization) and keep your settings public. Potential candidates will be scoping out hiring managers via their LinkedIn pages – not just the business page – to prepare for job interviews and to see what kind of people they might be working with if they take the placement, even if the temporary contract is for a relatively short amount of time. Just having a up to date profile isn’t enough though – you ideally need to be posting articles or sharing links that resonate with you as an employer, demonstrate your values and will subsequently aid your technical recruitment mission.
As long as you remember that in attracting the right people to an organization you and your business is being ‘auditioned’ as much as you are assessing potential candidates, and as such, anything that is public facing on the internet relating to the business should show it in the best light possible, making you and your firm a more attractive prospect than those with similar opportunities.
Connect With Others
Dale Carnegie’s famous book ‘How to Win Friends & Influence People’ once stated: “You can make more friends in two months by being interested in them than in two years by making them interested in you.” Not only do you want to post your own content, but you should also engage with and react to other people’s blogs and post your job advert on appropriate groups. Or, you could simply add potential candidates and like a few of their posts in the hopes of making them come to you.
To streamline the technical recruitment process, your next step (back in the real world now) could be to get in touch with a specialist technical recruitment agency to see how they can help you to find the right candidates for the role. Taking advantage of a recruitment consultant’s long-built network of suitable candidates will save you a lot of time and energy (and, of course, money) compared to doing it completely alone or enlisting the help of a non-specialist.
