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).