LinkedIn Tips and Tricks

Author – Sophia SimonI wanted to share my experience and some quick LinkedIn tips with everyone in my first blog post. It all started when I was new to recruiting in the nuclear industry sector. My biggest challenge was in finding candidates for expatriate assignments. I immediately started scourging the job boards and turning them upside down for the right candidates for my highly specific jobs. To add a cherry on the cake, the skills criteria for candidates were rigid and after a lot of futile attempts and frustration, I finally decided to go about this the right way. I had to come up with an ideal strategy and get over the job boards once and for all. My strategy involved some heavy duty passive sourcing.

The first networking tool which I thought of was LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my favorite networking tool right since I started recruiting and I always added a lot of professionals from various industry sectors to my LinkedIn network. But, when I started searching for experts within the nuclear industry; I wasn’t getting results that I could boast of. The main reason for this lack of success was that I didn’t have nuclear industry professionals in my LinkedIn network. Without further ado I had to start adding the who’s who of the nuclear industry in my LinkedIn connections. Where to start was the question? I sent out add requests to a whole lot of Nuclear professionals. But, I had a fear of rejection from candidates because this would drastically affect my cherished LinkedIn account. I did not want to take any chances. But, giving up was not the solution. So I had to be smart with LinkedIn. In my quest for nuclear industry expat candidates I found some really cool ways to work LinkedIn  which continue to help me tremendously.

Here are my special LinkedIn tips:

• Send requests to all the candidates that you speak with right after you hang up. The candidates are more likely to add a recruiter that they have just spoken to rather than a stranger who approaches them on LinkedIn. Once the request is accepted it opens new doors of opportunity to connect with that particular candidate’s network.

• Join groups where candidates with specific skills sets or a niche industry sector will have discussions on LinkedIn. Being a member of that group, the recruiter can send messages which go to everyone in the group. I had sent some messages giving a short introduction to the jobs and benefits for my client. The results were amazing and within a week I had over 150 contacts in the nuclear industry. Obviously I was thrilled and this worked! Many professionals even sent requests asking me to add them voluntarily. I guess being at the right place and at the right time means something on the internet too. J.

• An excellent method of reaching out to people is to start a discussion in any of the groups by using links on the internet about that particular technology to bag responses from the professionals. Professionals will comment to posts and can be directly added to your LinkedIn connections. Another cool thing to do with discussion groups is to post job adverts in and hope for a placement from one of the solid responses.

• Ask intelligent, technology specific questions to the people in your LinkedIn connections list. These questions are generally related to their industry, they can be found on the internet with a little bit of research or by staying abreast of the news, views and reviews in that technology specific sector.

• Request for references or referrals by drafting very effective emails and send it to all the connections. The candidates forward the emails with job details to other people in their network and the job gets a wide publicity. A lot of the professionals in the candidates’ network will respond to the recruiters out of curiosity to know more about the job, client, salary, benefits, etc.

These techniques are simple to follow and I am still adding to the list. I will definitely share with everyone once I have some more cool LinkedIn tips. Before you start adding connections to your LinkedIn account please remember to have a very descriptive and concrete LinkedIn profile, the professionals will choose to network with someone who comes across as extremely credible. We will also discuss steps to create a great LinkedIn profile in the upcoming posts. Happy reading and happy networking!