A Recruiter’s perspective: LinkedIn and the rules of engagement

LinkedIn has changed the way recruiters look for people to build their candidate pipeline. All they need to do is just type a few key words separated by AND & OR and a few more Boolean logic and they have lists of people show up in seconds. For those of us who did headhunting in the pre-LinkedIn era, finding viable candidates took weeks if not months. You had to make those cold calls pretending to be someone you weren't. You had to invent names in a flash, leave voice messages and hope your messages were returned. Calling 30 candidates takes more time and effort than sending 30 inmails.

With LinkedIn, recruiters can get a sense of the talent out there in minutes. They have the option to look for people with similar profiles if they find someone interesting and relevant to the position they are working on. They can reach out to active and passive candidates. They can look for people all over the world and sound them on opportunities that candidates wouldn't have had the opportunity to know if a platform like LinkedIn didn't exist. In essence, the front end piece of recruiting, talent sourcing, has been made much easier by LinkedIn. We owe it to LinkedIn for making it easy for us to know that the people we are looking for indeed exist.

When something becomes easy, there is something that becomes equally difficult. So when you think you can generate profiles and candidates for a job role with relative ease, there are others who can do the same. Look at any job posting in LinkedIn and you will find tens of similar job postings pop up in just your geographical area. You can bet other recruiters are ‘hunting’ the same set of candidates as you. With LinkedIn, the same candidate is available to all!

That is where the real recruiting effort starts. You may be able to reach out to those candidates but making them interested in your job or respond to your inmails still requires recruiters to be as savvy if not more in crafting their messages. The message has to be compelling enough and relevant to that person. I have seen LinkedIn profiles of people with a special note for recruiters asking them not to contact them or to read their profiles thoroughly before contacting them.

A recruiter needs to practice the fundamentals of recruiting more than ever to hold the interest of a candidate. A recruiter needs to be able to engage the candidate by sharing the organization’s vision, pitching the role & growth opportunities, and of course he/she needs to be able to tell the candidate on what’s in it for them. Most importantly, a recruiter needs to be genuinely interested in finding out a candidate's career aspirations. Else, a recruiter’s effort in reaching out to a candidate may just translate in another note being written in someone’s LinkedIn profile addressed to the entire recruiter fraternity out there.

The rules of candidate engagement still remain the same even if the method of initial engagement has changed/evolved over these last few years.