Linkedin Recruiter Professional Services - Review

Linkedin has recently announced that they are rolling out their Recruiter platform to recruitment companies. Initially this product was only available to corporate recruiters. I have spoken to a number of corporate recruiters who have spent a reasonable amount of money on this product and in general their feedback has been very good. So I signed up for the first of the webinars demonstrating it.

Now I need to make an important point. If you contact Linkedin and ask them what profile do I need to upgrade to in order to "see the entire network" they will point you in the direction of the Recruiter Platform, which is their most expensive product. This is wrong and their sales staff are being very canny in how they answer this.

The good news is if you have a linkedin profile, regardless of what account type you or how many connections you have made, YOU CAN ALREADY SEE THE ENTIRE NETWORK. Yes all 52m. I have tested this myself. If you don't believe me do a search of the network just for UK profiles. If will show you a number just over 2.7m. We all see the same number of profiles. The difference being as a corporate account user I can see more of the individual's profile. However, even this is a mute point as in 99% of searches the basic account will show enough data for a recruiter to be able to make a well informed decision on whether the linkedin member is worth contacting about the vacancy.

Right, I feel better now I have got that off my chest.

The RPS (Recruiter Professional Services) is essentially the same product that corporate recruiters have been using for over a year. It looks really good and is very easy to use, and aside from being a nice and simple product it actually has lots of nice features which will enhance your average Linkedin sourcing strategy.

Including:

• You can "pool" inmails. So if multiple users are on RPS all their inmail quotas are shared in one big pot.
  
• Your search results are listed in a summarised format so you can see where the hits are against your search and easily scroll down through multiple profiles on the one page.
• You can shortlist profiles to a folder and then send inmails in batches of up to 10 (Linkedin is very careful not to make it easy for someone to spam inmails, hence the limit of 10).
  
• You can see 1,000 profiles in your results (if you get 1,000 results you are not searching correctly, but technically this is still a benefit if you really want to wade through that many profiles).
• Multiple users can share project folders and collaborate together on campaigns.
• You can add notes against profiles that stay within RPS.
  
• All individual consultant activity is logged in the account. So if someone leaves your employment you do not need access to their Linkedin account to see what roles they have been working on, what inmails they sent and notes they made.

All in all, I was a little sceptical to start off with but in the end I was impressed. It's not meant to be an ATS, although it has many similar features. If you use linkedin on a shoestring as most recruiters seem to, then it probably won't interest you. If like me you use Linkedin as a primary recruitment tool and you send a lot of inmails, then I would give serious consideration to making a purchase.