The world of recruitment has changed. Instead of posting a want ad on online job sites or the traditional way of doing it on newspapers, organizations are looking to social media to fill in vacant positions in their company. It is now commonplace for companies to post vacancies on their Facebook page or use their Twitter accounts to find employees. Those looking for visually creative talents rely on Pinterest to find candidates. For IT, however, LinkedIn provides the best platform.
LinkedIn is the business person’s social network. Everything that is related to a person’s job and career is there. Your LinkedIn profile lists the companies, positions and skills that you have. It allows you to list in the programming languages, the environments, the platforms and other important job-related details.
Companies can search for candidates on LinkedIn. You pay for the service, but you get access to 300 million users and that is just as of May 2014.
If you find too many matches, you can use advanced filters that come with your premium account in order to limit the results to those who are most likely to be the right candidates for you. This way, you no longer have to sort through a lot of candidates just to find the right one. As an employer, you will also be able to send an InMail to the candidate inviting him or her to apply for the position that you have.
LinkedIn is also a great tool for headhunting. If you have plans of getting talent from another company, you can specify the company and just see who is on LinkedIn. That is how targeted LinkedIn can be. You can even start negotiating with the person on the platform.
Even if you are just looking to beef up your talent pool, you can rely on LinkedIn. Opening up a new cloud-based service soon? You can find the talents you need, programmers, IT specialists and those who have experience in a particular platform as a service, software as a service or infrastructure as a service company.
All these even without directly connecting with candidates. This helps you keep your future plans under wraps, while also making it known to the candidates who you are and what company you are representing.
Job posting made easier and more effective
If you are not actively searching, yet you have a position to fill in, you can still go the old way: post a job vacancy and wait for the resumes to come in.
But you have a boost when you use LinkedIn to post your jobs. For one, if your company already has a page on the platform, you can just add these jobs to that page for people who are really interested in working for you to find. Or you can have LinkedIn e-mail your positions to be filled to their subscribers. These are people who have signed up to receive e-mails that notify them of job vacancies related to their field.
Candidate research
Another area where LinkedIn is tremendously useful is candidate research. There is a wealth of information that people often put up on their LinkedIn profiles that it can make your life easier.
Photo courtesy of Matthew Burpee.
