Linkedin… helping hiring managers to ‘get it'…

As a huge generalisation, recruiters ‘get it’. You know, the whole candidate attraction thing, using social media properly, thinking that anything online (including this blog) is a shop window of some sort.

Ok, this isn’t strictly true as a number of cold call conversations this week from recruitment agencies have confirmed but in the main good recruitment professionals understand that recruitment is a tricky old business, full of highs, lows the occasional surprise and a lot of tedious work that needs to be done if we are ever to find candidates that we like. As my new, yet to be written, yet to be published ‘recruitment playbook’ says, recruitment is a tough old game and you will die trying to master it.

I pride myself on having always been a proactive, pick up the phone kind of recruiter and have always encouraged my teams to take the same proactive, pick up the phone, send linkedin messages and talk to candidates a lot approach, going armed with something good to say to candidates, not wasting their time or mine.

Keep it simple, target people that look interesting and more importantly look interested. We all know that this increases the quantity and quality of the candidate pool and gives the hiring manager a much better chance of getting what they want both today and tomorrow.

Yet on occasion whatever recruiters do is often perceived as not enough. Not only are hiring managers subject matter experts in their own field, they are recruitment gurus as well, knowing that the only sure way to find candidates is to post some job adverts and wait for the results whilst shouting at the recruitment team that they are doing all the work themselves.

It could be so different.

Let me take you on a journey into time and space where the hiring manager saw themselves as part of the process.

Don’t get me wrong some do, the danger as always in writing anything is that I exclude the great people to work with, the managers who approach it as a collaboration rather than them having ‘recruitment’ done to them.

I do believe that we have an obligation as recruitment professionals to educate our hiring managers and where we can really help them is to get them to look again at how they interact with their networks.

Let’s get them looking at Linkedin properly, get them to join workshops, seminars, whatever works for them so that they to get an increase in interested traffic to their door. Traffic being a good word, a steady stream of candidates that arrive to you in Linkedin, your email or on the phone.

Hiring Managers typically have a network based on what they do, the teams that report into them, often better than a typical recruiters, purely because it has more focus, plumbers know plumbers, physicists know physicists and choose to talk about their sector or specialism. Because of this the starting point has become a no brainer, work with your hiring managers to sort out their linkedin profiles and then work with them again to sort out their linkedin behaviours. Get them to be as proactive as you, engage and build meaningful relationships not just point people to a passive job ad.

We need to help everyone in our organisations that hire to write a better linkedin profile with the knock on effect that it will attract talent to the organization. Improved profiles also help potential future hires. Compelling profiles that are informative will improve the candidate journey, as they will be better informed, know more about the people that will interview them, make them better prepared to give their best at an interview.

If you need help with your hiring mangers, getting them to see the benefit of a well thought out linkedin campaign based on their connections, network and not on job posts let me know or if you have something to add, don’t be shy, the comments section below is a good place to start.

M.

This blog will also appear on Linkedin. 

About
I have background in executive search and selection, headhunting and senior level recruitment combined with people and business management experiences. My focus has always been on the IT services, technology and management consultancy sectors on a permanent and interim basis where I have developed a personal portfolio that covers areas such as EVP, social recruitment and the successful creation of talent pools as well the management and leadership of corporate talent acquisition teams.

I am an avid blogger, writer, public speaker and traveller of trains across the UK.

In addition I am available from July 2014 for permanent or interim roles – http://www.linkedin.com/in/martindangerfield for more details.

Follow me here or twitter @MDangerfield, have a look at my blog www.martindangerfield.com/blog.