LinkedIn Or Job Boards. What’s Best For You?
Continuing from last week, I am looking at the emergence of LinkedIn as a recruitment tool. With its massive membership and its advanced search capability does a recruiter really need anything else?
LinkedIn has without a doubt had a huge impact on the recruitment industry. With a membership of over 300 million, across 200 countries it is the world’s largest professional network, offering companies unprecedented access to a massive pool of candidates.
With the growth of its membership, it is no surprise LinkedIn has evolved as a recruitment tool. It has developed advanced search capabilities, allows its users for a fee to advertise jobs online, and introduced LinkedIn Recruiter, which gives you the advantage of specifically targeting and approaching your desired audience.
Yet more traditional methods of recruitment continue to thrive. We are not seeing recruitment agencies closing or cutting staff numbers and the UK job websites (job boards) continue to advance. LinkedIn does not top the league table for numbers of jobs advertised and indeed many experienced recruiters agree their job advert performance is disappointing.
WHY YOUR LINKEDIN JOB ADVERT IS NOT PERFORMING
Primarily, LinkedIn is a business tool not a recruitment tool. Most LinkedIn users don’t initially go there to find a job but rather to network and gain a greater understanding of their industry; to gather leads, build business partnerships, share ideas, seek advice, and to follow business trends and business leaders. LinkedIn would not currently be a candidate’s first port of call when starting their job hunt and indeed for many non-professional roles LinkedIn may not be suitable.
Traditional job boards target an engaged and active candidate audience who are actively seeking a new opportunity. You have specialised boards, those that are more general and the aggregate boards which give you the opportunity to advertise across a variety of sites for one fee.
You can discover more about Job Advertising On Aggregators and Where To Post Job Ads in these informative posts.
Recruitment agencies will generally work from an active database or network of candidates, again an engaged audience. Of course the agencies will be using LinkedIn to back up their searches but they know only too well that they will have to kiss a number of frogs to find their one prince or princess.
LinkedIn requires a long term commitment. It is not just about reaching out to candidates through in-mail. Online profiles of yourself and your company need to be up to date and must be professional. To excite and entice, you need to be constantly working to increase your company profile; sharing information and testimonials on products or services.
You need to develop a strong and relevant network, with influencers that you can reach out to for recommendations.
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LinkedIn is without doubt an amazing tool, but you need to know how to use it if you want to see real results, and you need the time and resource to learn and then manage the process properly.
Clearly what is important is that for each unique vacancy, you consider what recruitment options you have and what will work best for you.
If you are currently recruiting and would like some help choosing where to advertise jobs please click here, take a look at our fixed fee job advertising packages or get in touch with a member of our team.
Next week is all about tips on how to get more out of LinkedIn in terms of finding those candidates that are right for your business without paying a penny!
Martha,
