Currently hiring 100 new employees itself, LinkedIn recently launched a new service called ‘Skills’.
This is a new functionality that job seekers should embrace quickly to add their specific skills to their profile, demonstrating to recruiters what skills the applicant themselves say they have expertise in and for how long, according to Declan Fitzgerald, LinkedIn’s international recruitment manager and, author of recruitment blog The Irish Cyber Sleuth.
“This information is important data for any profile as it gets indexed in LinkedIn’s ecosystem and may register on one of their ‘skills pages’ which could be an easier way for jobseekers to be noticed by proactive recruiters,” he said.
Creating an online employment brand
Fitzgerald maintains that when applying for a job there is now a new way to give yourself every possible chance of having your CV reviewed. He calls it “rebooting” your CV, or using social media to transform your application beyond the classical CV to create an online identity, or personal online employment brand that allows a prospective employer in a lot more detail get a flavour of who is applying for their job.
To do this, your first port of call should be LinkedIn, he said. “Growing by a user every second and having recently broken the 100m user mark, millions of professionals all over the world are ‘rebooting’ their CV and branding themselves online by placing their CV on the world’s biggest professional network.
“They are then breathing life into their profile by showing how many professional connections they have, adding Google presentation apps to their profile showing previous work they have done, placing in their Twitter feed, also their blog if they have one, and then adding recommendations to their profile.”
Companies proactively sourcing candidates online
It’s important to understand that some of the most successful companies in the world are now proactively sourcing candidates using internet technologies, he advised.
“They no longer rely solely on reactive tactics, hoping that candidates will come their way. They are proactively setting up internal sourcing teams with very well trained recruiters who understand how to mine information on LinkedIn to find candidates.
“This is an important shift in how recruitment teams recruit. They now spend huge amounts of time searching for online identities. These teams are continually becoming more skilled in how to interact with candidates in LinkedIn groups and Twitter feeds, as well interacting with candidates using blogs.”
Dynamic content and talent communities
In Fitzgerald’s view, being a recruiter in a modern progressive recruitment department means understanding how to harness the power of the web and all its social media components to proactively source candidates and develop a powerful, interactive real-time employment brand with dynamic content and talent communities thriving in the now talent economy we exist in.
“If recruiters are deploying new tactics to find new candidates, shouldn’t jobseekers be doing the same to grab the attention of these recruiters? By setting up your LinkedIn profile, and following the LinkedIn company’s page of an organisation you may want to join, you may just hear about your dream job before it even gets published on a company’s career site,” he said.
“By joining LinkedIn you may be able to find that hiring manager or recruiter for that job you really want and by sending them a personalised InMail you may just catch their attention and get that opportunity to interview that you may never have got if you only applied for a job using your traditional CV.”
