An estimated 95% of recruiters* use LinkedIn as a primary tool to find candidates to meet a client brief.
However how recruiters use LinkedIn can vary from company to company and consultant to consultant. At a basic level, you can use the platform to advertise jobs and search for specific candidates.
But smarter recruiters are using LinkedIn automation tools, like Dux-Soup, to more easily identify candidates who may not be actively seeking a new opportunity. Finding and engaging with these prospective candidates requires a particular set of skills and can be more time-consuming.
Let’s take a look at how you can use LinkedIn automation across the recruitment lifecycle.
Building a network
Practically every single person I have come across in recruitment has thousands of LinkedIn connections. Maintaining a large pool of contacts is a key part of being able to tap into a ready-made network whenever a new client brief is received.
Many recruiters will use LinkedIn as an applicant storage system. Continually expanding the network is therefore vital and this is where LinkedIn automation tools excel. It starts with automating the process of sending new connection requests which is a bit of a no-brainer.
Here’s what is looks like (super simplified) using the Dux-Soup tool as an example:
From brief to search
As soon as a new brief has been received, the faster a recruiter can go back to the client with suitable candidates, the more chance they will have of securing interviews. Whilst quality is of course paramount, the benefit of first mover advantage cannot be underestimated. So, the first thing a recruiter will do is to search through existing connections to find candidates that match the brief.
Much of this process will likely be done outside of LinkedIn. However, Canadian recruiter RJS (see case study below) is actually using Dux-Soup as a first stage applicant search and tracking system.
Recruitment in action: RJS Associates
RJS is a specialist recruitment agency covering Canada and the US. Dux-Soup has delivered a sustainable competitive advantage by boosting efficiency and productivity, allowing RJS to reach hard-to-find candidates and spend more time on placing high quality staff.
Every day, Dux-Soup is used to visit profiles and send out connection requests. This saves RJS hours of effort and enables the recruitment team to focus on more value-adding activities, such as final qualification of candidates, managing customer relationships and closing the deal with the customer.
Dux-Soup’s ability to quickly find and connect to prospective candidates adds value to RJS’s LinkedIn Recruiter subscription. It effectively acts as a first stage applicant search and tracking system for the company.
“Dux-Soup enables RJS to manage recruitment at scale casting a wide net with minimal effort. It gives us a competitive advantage over other recruiters not using growth hacking techniques, and quite honestly, we blow them out of the water with our speed of response and quality of candidate,” says RJS. To read the full case study click here.
Connect
If the recruiter is expanding into new markets or simply doesn’t have enough contacts that meet the brief, they can use the filtering criteria in LinkedIn Recruiter to create a list of potential candidates.
They can then use Dux-Soup to capture their details from LinkedIn.
Or, they can use the auto-visit and tagging facility in a tool like Dux-Soup to achieve the same result.
The advantage of using Dux-Soup is that they can then automate the sending of personalized connection requests and even follow-up messages post connection using the Dux-Soup Revisit tool.
This saves time in the initial phases allowing recruiters to focus on other tasks – plus it means the process can be speeded up significantly.
Read: How to use LinkedIn for recruitment and save 75% of your time.
Engage and qualify
Once your connection request is accepted, you can begin the engagement process. This is all about talking about the role and establishing if the candidate is interested in finding out more. Again, with a tool like Dux-Soup, even some of this can be automated in the initial phases.
If you get a positive reply, you can go ahead and start screening your candidate by taking the conversation offline and into a phone call or face-to-face meeting. After all, the personal touch is still a key part of the recruitment process.
This qualification process will allow you to identify those candidates who both match the brief and are interested in being put forward.
View from the candidate
Aslam Osman is a senior IT professional who has worked as an interim manager in the UK market for six years.
He says, “During the last 18 months, I have noticed a significant increase in the number of approaches from new recruiters via LinkedIn. It is simple to work out which ones have taken the time to look at my profile and craft a suitable connection message. I’m surprised at those that are poorly targeted such as referencing experience or roles from 10 years ago or more that are long out of date.
When you are already in a senior interim IT leadership role, it is always important to look ahead to the next assignment contract. The recruiters that have used the information in my profile to accurately match my skillset to the job opportunity are far more likely to be given the time of day.
Due to the roles I typically cover, I get inundated with LinkedIn connections and requests, particularly from IT suppliers. It can make trying to pick out recruiter approaches difficult due to time pressures.
I therefore have to be brutal with how I filter out connection requests and anything that isn’t highly targeted, is deleted straight away.”
Conclusion
Recruitment is fundamentally time-consuming. Improving efficiency is an obvious goal but to go to the next level and crush your competition requires a smarter approach.
Dux-Soup can help recruiters walk the fine line between different priorities such as finding candidates, interviewing and liaising with the client and new business development activities to bring on future clients.
LinkedIn automation can be invaluable in personalizing the outreach strategy and has a lot of value across much of the lifecycle that I described above.
But one of the major benefits is that it enables recruiters to automate manual activity which frees staff up to focus more on engaging with prospective candidates. It also gives you back time to spend on managing the client relationship.
You can read about how RJS uses Dux-Soup to dominate its competition here.
* Just in case you are wondering, at the start of the article I quoted a stat that 95% of recruiters use LinkedIn, which got me thinking, ‘what the heck are the other 5% doing?’ That 5% represents the most senior roles that are being filled – think bank CEOs, Managing Directors of Fortune/FTSE companies. These senior executives don’t generally have a LinkedIn profile, and if they did, it is unlikely they would be responsive to standard outreach methods.
About the author
Adam Osman is Head of Marketing at Dux-Soup He is passionate about using the latest marketing techniques to help companies and brands grow. With two decades of experience in marketing technology products for international companies and startups alike, Adam leads the effort to spread the word about how Dux-Soup can benefit companies looking to turbo charge their lead generation.
