If we go a few years back, it was either an advantage or a positive thing if a job candidate had a LinkedIn profile. A couple of years ago it started to be a requirement, and soon if you don’t have one, you just won’t exist – at least not in the eyes of recruiters or headhunters.

 

As you may know, job advertising has shifted heavily toward social media. More traditional organisations are still using traditional employment websites such as Monster, but the most interesting companies have been looking for employees elsewhere for a long time. These organisations are aiming to recruit the best talent and this way they understand that there’s usually at least one common factor for them: They already have a job and they’re not spending their days browsing exhausting employment websites. If they really need to be caught and make them attracted, the message must be targeted in a channel or channels where the people are spending their time anyway.

 

For this purpose, LinkedIn is frankly a tool of dreams. I’m sure a lot of people don’t think of it from this point of view, but all of the information filled in voluntarily on LinkedIn, by the hundreds of millions of LinkedIn users, is also in use for advertising purposes and as such is available for effective recruitment advertising.

 

So, even without saying it’s clear that if you’re not on LinkedIn, you miss out on a lot and the day when someone contacts you spontaneously and offers you the job of your dreams simply won’t come.

 

It’s extremely easy to post an interesting update about an open job to the company’s LinkedIn page and start “sponsoring” it afterwards. This means in all simplicity that the update is pushed with money to the home feeds of targeted people. You can target the post however you want – by experience, skills, location, job task, know-how, industry, title, education etc. – or targeting for example only the people working in specific companies.

 

The other thing that’s becoming more common and which LinkedIn is also strongly encouraging is that the companies are proactively looking for employees and contacting them directly on LinkedIn. One clear example of this is when you use LinkedIn to control the recruiting process, in other words using it as a channel to receive the applications, another list can be found in the same place where you have all the people who have applied. This other list is called “matches” and curiously LinkedIn shows you that before the actual list where you have the people who have applied to the job.

 

So, in “matches” you have people who haven’t applied to the job but could be potential fits based on their know-how, background and skills. It will be the recruiter’s decision whether they’ll approach these people with a direct message or if they will trust that the right person will be found among those who apply for the job by themselves.

 

So, even without saying it’s clear that if you’re not on LinkedIn, you miss out on a lot and the day when someone contacts you spontaneously and offers you the job of your dreams simply won’t come.

 

Written,

Teemu Ruuska
Director
InHunt World

www.linkedin.com/in/teemuruuska

Teemu is a Director of InHunt World and has been working in recruitment and headhunting industry since 2009. Teemu is from Finland and came to Spain in 2014 to set up and open new headhunting offices in Madrid and later in Barcelona. Since last year Teemu has been focusing to design, create and run the new InHunt World International Headhunting Network which already covers nearly 20 countries.

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