Co-presenting on Linkedin Recruitment at the Social Recruitment Workshop (London, Wednesday 26th June 2010)

Last Wednesday I was invited to co-present at the Social Recruitment Workshop in London that was arranged by Peter Gold from Hirestrategies. It was the first event of this scale that Peter had put on, as he normally focuses on running events with one main speaker (himself). Co-ordinating 20-25 so called Online Recruitment experts was never going to be easy but the day went pretty much to schedule as far as I can see.

As for the day, it had an interesting mix of both in-house recruiters and agency recruiters (who were referred to as “3^rd party recruiters” no one likes to use the term “agency” anymore for some reason!). These two parties were split of into two rooms within their designated groups with each presenter delivering their session twice in the day. This meant I only got to see half the presenters but what I saw was useful for me and I was meant to be one of the experts.

The day started with Mark Williams (Mr Linkedin) delivering a presentation on how Recruiters should be using Linkedin, ably assisted by my good self as his co-presenter, which is a nice way of saying “laptop monkey”. Mark has a very intimate knowledge of Linkedin even down into the number of characters you can add in each field. He spent a reasonable amount of time explaining how to setup your individual and company profile to market yourself correctly and be optimised in searches. For example, if a candidate looks to find a recruiter within their sector they might just put “SAP Recruiter” into Linkedin and see who comes up top. The summary to this is there are lots of ways to optimise your profile but it’s a balancing act between stuffing it full of terms and still having a well written professional profile that will encourage candidates and clients to contact you. All in all an interesting area that I have to admit to have overlooked in my Linkedin Webinars that focus on how to market your vacancies, find and approach relevant people.

Linkedin was followed by Andy Headworth from Sirona Consulting (AKA Mr Twitter/Worthing Crocman) running a session on Twitter. The first attempt at which was delivered without internet, after some technical difficulties. Not an easy task. Peter had made a big emphasis that the event should be about doing (delegates were encouraged to bring laptops and most did) rather that presenting so “death by powerpoint” was frowned upon. So with no powerpoint notes and no internet Andy had to just talk for about 40 minutes. In an ironic twist 90% of his delegates had no issues with connecting to the wireless internet.

Anyone that knows Andy will appreciate that a 40 min ramble would normally not be a problem for him, and after a little bit of a ca-fuffle he was in his flow and providing insight into more and more twitter applications, twitter etiquette and general usage as a recruiter. Andy knows his stuff in this area without doubt and whilst I believe for some companies Twitter is a useful communication channel I doubt most 3^rd party/agency recruiters are going to see a real return for them fully embracing it. Yes you can easily distribute your vacancies in a automated fashion via this channel, you can search bios and tweets to find candidates but will you see the benefits by investing 30-60 minutes per day to market your personal recruitment brand with original thought provoking content?

So the day was a big success for Peter and the feedback from the delegates I spoke with was very positive. It will be interesting to see where Peter goes from here and how much larger this event gets. There is a lot of other events in this space many of which are paid for conference type events, but Peter has shown it can be done and done well for free, so we all await the update on whether he will be booking out the O2 Arena for next year? I have already started working on my rider!

Linkedin Vacancy Distribution - Posting Jobs to your Linkedin Profile via the BlogLink Application

On May 25th we will be launching our Career Site product with a free days training for interested parties. We plan to build careers sites that are closely integrated with Social Media and able to distribute our client's vacancies automatically to Twitter and Facebook as well as Job Board Aggregators such as Indeed and Trovit. The aim being to distribute vacancies onto as many relevant mediums as possible with zero effort required from them. But what about Linkedin?

Well if you post vacancies on Linkedin ($195 a posting) then they will show up in your linkedin profile.


They will also show up on your company page.
As part of the research, we were keen to devise a way of having your latest jobs feed into your profile so that anyone viewing your profile can leap straight to your careers site if a vacancy catches their eye. Once again this is a long range tactic that will eventually pay off so you don't want to have to keep updating / tweaking your profile. Keep the input (your time) to a minimum, then you are under less pressure to deliver a quantifiable output (hires/applications).

Step 1 - Get an RSS feed from your Applicant Tracking Software Vendor (Recruitment Software)

If you don't have an ATS provider then you will probably not be able to take advantage of this method. But we use Hireserve and I would recommend them highly (we like them so much we actually partnered with them to sell their products to our clients).

Our RSS feed is: http://jobs.easywebrecruitment.com/rss.xml

Step 2 -Add the RSS feed as a listed website under "MyRSS Feed"

Select to edit your profile. Then select to edit the websites that are listed under your profile.


Then choose "MyRSS Feed" and input your RSS feed.


Step 3 - Viola!

Your vacancies will automatically appear in your profile.



Those of you who are very clever will realise that although this method does work there is a small problem in that our RSS feed is not listing our most recent roles but its listing them alphabetically. Do not fret. Your RSS feed should be able to list them in date order, we have already raised this with Hireserve and a quick fix will be in place soon.

NEXT WEEK

Next week we will show you the second half of this strategy including how to get your vacancies automatically listing in your company page for zero effort. Watch this space....

Linkedin Vacancy Distribution - Posting Jobs in Linkedin Groups for FREE

This is the second in a series of posts about distributing your vacancies throughout Linkedin. The final post in this series will be tomorrow when I will show you how to have your vacancies automatically feed into your Linkedin Profile. If you are interested in this subject matter, I run a free weekly webinar on recruiting via Linkedin.

When you join Linkedin you have the option to search for and join relevant groups. Usually centered around specific industries or skill-sets, these groups can be an excellent way to tap into a large population of both active and passive candidates.

Some examples of Linkedin groups...

Linked:HR (#1 Human Resources Group)

• Created: September 19, 2007
• Type: Networking Group
• Access: This group is open to everyone
• Members: 272,754

CREATIVE DESIGN PROS

• Created: June 13, 2008
• Type: Professional Group
• Members: 23,677

Most groups have an open door policy, but it's worth checking out any you'd like to join thoroughly beforehand. You should also pay particular attention to your Group Settings, when you sign up. You want probably want to make sure that group members are able to contact you directly, people who see your advert might apply online if you add a link, but in my experience they will probably reach out and send you a message to check out their profile and give them a call. So you must leave the door open for them to message you. I generally set my group settings so that I do not receive announcements and updates on discussions (see image below).

The Jobs Tab

Linkedin now allows group administrators to add an area to each group where group members can post jobs for free. I cannot be 100% on the origin of this idea but it probably came about by the high number of jobs being posted as discussions within Linkedin groups. Not all groups will carry a jobs section, it's down to the preference of each group's administrator, but if they do then it's the ideal way to post your vacancy, and another opportunity to use the bit.ly links discussed in yesterdays post.

Predicting Success

Posting a job within a group is very simple, see the example below.

However you might want to research the potential of your groups to perform on your roles. This is done by searching for people but focusing it on one group at a time. Imagine you recruit sales professionals within the IT industry for UK based roles, you might have joined some of the largest IT, Sales and IT Sales groups on linkedin. You can search within these groups after you have joined them to get some ideas of how many relevant sales professionals within the UK are members of these groups. It is not always the best groups that deliver the most relevant people.

So my advice in summary is:
a) Join lots of groups that you think might be relevant (you can join up to 50).
b) Once you are a member do a people search of members of each group and determine whether each group is worth staying a member of.
c) Produce a hit list of your top groups and always post your jobs in them.
d) Monitor the Bit.ly metrics to confirm that your audience is paying attention and track any applicants that apply via this medium.

Posting a job within a group does not take long, which is good as you will probably not be overloaded with enquiries. Similar to your status update, it's a strategy where you have to play the long game to get the results.

Linkedin Vacancy Distribution - Status Updates

We put a lot of effort into searching the millions of profiles found on linkedin when we're recruiting for those more demanding roles. It's a topic I've spoken about on this blog before and cover in depth in my Linkedin Training Webinars, but what about the other side of the coin? What can be done to help candidates searching Linkedin for job opportunities to find your vacancy?

This week I'm going to take a look at some quick and easy methods you can use to get your vacancy in front of the right people. Starting with an area of your Linkedin profile that most visitors see first, your status update.

Updating the status on your linkedin profile is a quick and easy way to immediately broadcast a vacancy to the Linkedin network. Simply log in to linkedin and fill in your status update box (see above) to immediately broadcast your vacancy. This displays in the network activity section on the homepage of your connections and in the email update they receive from Linkedin.

Making it easy for applicants to apply is a key issue, and ideally you want to provide a link that will take them somewhere they can both get more information on the role, and apply online with the minimum of fuss. While your hands might be tied slightly by where your vacancy has been posted, the link provides a great opportunity to implement a little "meta-analytics" and see how people are reacting to your post.

Using Bit.ly

What is bit.ly? bit.ly allows users to shorten, share, and track links (URLs). Reducing the URL length makes sharing easier (useful for the limited space of a status update).

Producing a bit.ly link is easy and can be done in seconds at bit.ly, sign up to a free account and you will also be able to track the number of hits your link receives and where they come from.

If your link is getting a large number of hits you'll know that you have a great opportunity to grow your network in that area, widening the audience for future vacancies. Of course the ultimate metric is "did you hire from this method" but as this method is one that take seconds and delivers a relevant candidate occasionally, you will likely have to do it over an over again until you get a hire. 


This is why bit.ly is important, because the potential of success with this method largely depends on the strength and relevance of your network. If you are advertising a Software Developer role when your network is full of bankers the chance of success is greatly reduced and will largely depend on them referring your status update on to their network or to someone they know (see here to see how Linkedin is encouraging its network to share). Bit.ly will give you a good indication as to whether anyone is actually clicking on your update.

Tomorrow, I will show you how to post jobs within groups, a simple but effective strategy to get your jobs in front of the right people for FREE.

On Saturday, I will finish this little series of blogs by showing you how to get your jobs to dynamically update in your profile via the BlogLink application. So you profile automatically shows your organisations latest roles (see example below).

Latest Improvements to our Advert Optimisation

We've blogged previously about the importance of choosing the right job title for your advert, and nobody takes more care or researches this more thoroughly than our resource team at Easy Web. To give you a quick example, you might think that placing an advert for a customer advisor to work in a contact centre is perfectly sound, but by changing the title to Customer Service and referring to a call centre rather than contact centre you will increase potential traffic by a massive amount





Our attitude to job boards has always been one of maximum (worthwhile) coverage, and now we're bringing the optimisation of our adverts in line with that. Because we run 4 week long campaigns we're able to vary the keywords we use across those 4 weeks, capturing traffic from not just the most popular search terms, but also those terms that are slightly less popular.

In yesterday's post, I talked about how introducing more emotive, exciting terms can make your adverts titles STAND OUT and more appealing. The negative side to these titles is their poor optimisation. Throughout our four week campaigns we will now be utilising both STAND OUT and standard job titles where we deem them suitable. This should help ensure that we are appealing to all parts of the market and attracting the most relevant candidates.

We've also made other improvements to the way we structure our adverts, some of which we'd like to keep close to our chest, but one I will share with you is the repetition of the keyword based title at the beginning of the article. What difference does that make I hear you ask? On most job boards, not a great deal, but on one major job board in particular, it's a heavily weighted factor in their search algorithm, highlighting again the need for a bit of extra research before you post your advert.