Start by fishing where the fish are.

Today, companies across the board, have transitioned the recruitment function in-house. The underlying idea is that with seemingly infinite candidate pool that channels like LinkedIn provides, it is much cheaper and more efficient to hire an army of recruiters and have them scour the database to find the best candidates. It’s logical to believe that the war for talent will be won and lost over human capital data and information, and more precisely over human capital information retrieval and analytics.

So, where is most of the social recruiting happening?  It is on LinkedIn.

With 500 million+ members, the total number of monthly active users on LinkedIn is 106 million. 2 new members are added to LinkedIn every second.

Can LinkedIn be an excellent recruiting channel to connect the right people with the right roles? Yes certainly. Clearly, it\’s a great database for recruiters.

But, this is where it gets tricky

#1.  Everyone’s chasing the same purple squirrels

“The job market today has transformed into a candidate’s marketplace wherein candidates choose their employers, as opposed to recruiters choosing them.

Since everyone is working from the same database, they are seeing the same candidates as everyone else for searches as everyone else.

Anyone with high-demand skills listed on their LinkedIn profiles or who have other desirable traits (e.g., a degree from a premier B-school, employed at a marquee brand etc.) are getting hammered by recruiters.

#2. InMail Response Rates

On the candidate side, many people now complain of being inundated by InMails. Did you know that 92% of Fortune 1000 companies are LinkedIn customers? If you uncover a hot candidate on LinkedIn, recruiters are already bombarding them with InMail messages. These individuals are hard to recruit – it’s also incredibly difficult for your company to stand out.

An Inmail has become the default ‘low hanging fruit’ and easy for any recruiter to send InMails all day. Because it has gotten \”too easy\” to send out a lot of messages, the message volume has gone up even though the number of desirable candidates is relatively fixed. Thus, InMails response rates appear to be going down

When you find a good candidate, they’ve probably already been hit up with job offers 20 or 30 times…just this morning.

The result is a vicious cycle; as recruiters find it more difficult to identify the ideal candidate, they send out more and more requests and receive fewer and fewer responses. Clearly, this strategy leads to frustration for the employer and candidate alike.

#3. Authenticity of Data

You’re finding people and reading about them essentially based on what they say about themselves, and what others they\’ve hand-picked say about them. They are marketing documents people put together to market themselves. So, the attendant challenge of dealing with candidates who are gaming the system with inflated resumes and ridiculous, hyperbolic cover letters.

Case in Point is Elaine Wherry\’s excellent blog post entitled \”the recruiter honeypot\”, she found the following after creating a fake LinkedIn profile designed to catch the eye of recruiters:[1]

On December 10th, 2009, the first LinkedIn message arrived from Google. Mozilla followed on December 15th. Ning and Facebook followed in January. Since then, Pete averaged a recruiter ping every 40 hours and saw 530 emails from 382 recruiters across 172 organizations.

[1] https://women2.com/stories/2012/06/27/the-recruiter-honeypot

#4. Time consuming since he’s not looking out

Recruiters often waste valuable time and effort pursuing individuals who won’t even entertain the idea of transitioning to a new job.

It is very difficult to gauge what an individuals is wanting out of posting a piece of information on their newsfeed. Are they looking? Are they satisfied in their current role? Did they create this profile a year ago and haven\’t been back since?

#5. Passive Candidates

Passive candidates may not be looking at LinkedIn all the time. Tools like InMail assume that the person checks LinkedIn often which is not always the case and cannot substitute for an old fashioned \”cold call\”.

#6. Cost

Let’s also not forget about the costs. The cost of LinkedIn Recruiter

So, what’s the way forward?

To get ahead, companies must take a look at what worked in the past – namely, the human touch – and leverage today’s technology to make recruiting personal again. It was the deep understanding of candidates that made headhunters so successful.

So get the conversation initiated smartly. Don’t just send candidates random messages with text-only job descriptions. Rather, explore the response for robust content that truly engages, like a welcome video from the hiring manager or pictures showing off the unique work environment. Provide enough interesting and useful information so a candidate has a reason to review the job and see if it is a fit.

A text-only job description is dead on arrival. Candidates know they are boilerplate and mind-numbing

So, each InMail has to be well-researched and personalized to show that it’s NOT a mass email.

LinkedIn is still a great repository of professional profiles and an awesome networking tool. But remember, just having a set of keys of the Ferrari doesn’t mean you can drive it like a pro.

Thanks & Regards

Sonia Singal +919088026253