LinkedIn is quickly becoming the “go-to” site for recruiters. With over 80 million members in 200 countries, LinkedIn provides a vehicle for recruiters to extend their global outreach, engage passive candidates and strengthen employer. While most solutions in the market target either job seekers or employers, LinkedIn has successfully reached both audiences. The social networking site has not only redefined how job seekers search for opportunities but also, how recruiters source for candidates. We found that nearly 70% of organizations are using social networking sites in their talent acquisition efforts. Yet, the challenge most organizations face is not “why” or “when” to use these sites but “how.” Do organizations truly understand the value of LinkedIn? Are organizations clearly articulating their social media strategy and effectively measuring the ROI?
After attending last week’s LinkedIn conference, it became clear that organizations still have a long way to go in understanding how to truly maximize the value of social media. And for those who have…it is clearly worth it.
What Does LinkedIn Offer Recruiters?
• LinkedIn Recruiter- LinkedIn’s initial decision to provide recruiters with a larger database of names and profiles outside of their own personal networks created a large amount of controversy in 2008. In fact, many recruiters who had been actively building out their own database on the site, decided to boycott the site by investing their time and resources elsewhere. Today, organizations both large and small have embraced the LinkedIn Recruiter model and have taken advantage of the improved search engine, ability to contact candidates through direct mail campains (“In Mails”) and manage a talent pipeline through project folders.
• Recruitment Ads- Recruitment advertising has changed drastically over the past 10 years as organizations have moved from print advertising, agency advertising, job boards to social networking. LinkedIn displays ads on LinkedIn’s homepage to targeted groups and reports on the effectiveness of advertising. Recruiters can use these ads to drive traffic to LinkedIn career pages and to job postings.
• Career Pages- Over the past few years, organizations have placed a heavy emphasis on corporate career pages in order to strengthen branding. The majority of organizations have relied on their Talent Acquisition Systems to support and host these sites. LinkedIn has created personalized career pages with the ability to target groups of candidates and without requiring these candidates to leave the LinkedIn site. Although, we do not see these sites as replacing Corporate career sites designed to drive candidates to the employer sites, they offer a way to connect recruiters and candidates, highlight employees, and strengthen the messaging of job candidates.
• Targeted Messaging- LinkedIn allows recruiters to create targeted messages through “InMails". These direct campaigns have an average open rate of 35% of which 7% convert into leads. Organizations are demanding more CRM capabilities, this functionality certainly meets their needs.
• Jobs Network- As more and more organizations move away from job boards, it is a natural fit for LinkedIn to provide a jobs network. In fact, each job posted has been forwarded an average of 11 times to different members. This tool does more than simply broadcast jobs, it engages passive candidates by showcasing employees that candidates may know at the organization, providing an ability to forward the job and providing additional information through a “jobs you may be interested in” feature.
What Best Practice Organizations are Seeing Results?
• Novartis- Through an integrated social media strategy, Novartis was able to fill 40 tough to fill roles using social networking sites, reduce time to fill by 20% and ensure that 40% of new hires were diverse candidates.
• Invensys- By training the entire talent acquisition function to utilize LinkedIn, Invensys saved $4 million in talent acquisition and aligned this function with the overall business.
• Salesforce- Since 90% of the employee population at Salesforce uses LinkedIn, they have effectively created an employee referral pipeline through LinkedIn.
• Dell – Through the use of LinkedIn Recruiter, the perception of their recruiting department in the organization has increased 10 fold.
As today’s economy evolves, LinkedIn offers organizations such as Novartis and Dell a way to reduce spending, improve productivity and identify quality of hire. We will be covering the impact of social media in our upcoming High Impact Talent Acquisition Practices research report and we would love to hear from you.