This post is sponsored by LinkedIn. The new LinkedIn Recruiter is helping talent acquisition professionals take a central role in business strategy.
In recruitment, as in all areas of business, time is of the essence. Between meetings with hiring managers or clients, candidate interviews and conference calls, recruiters – both agency and in-house – often find themselves lacking time to complete their single- most important task: finding the right talent for a role.
To make it easier to pinpoint the right person faster, LinkedIn recently rolled out its newly redesigned LinkedIn Recruiter product, the flagship product from its Talent Solutions business already used by 41,000 companies worldwide. The new innovations in the product are designed to help recruiters – both in-house and agency – and business owners find and engage the best talent faster by tapping into LinkedIn’s insights from its 414m members worldwide. The changes to LinkedIn Recruiter are expected to make the lives of recruiters easier than ever, and make it more accessible to non-specialists who are responsible for talent acquisition as part of their role, including small business owners and HR teams. The updates will make it possible for them to bring new data insights to inform the hiring conversations they have with business leaders. It’s all part of LinkedIn’s drive to evolve recruitment professionals to be more strategic advisors for their organisation.
A number of companies have had special early access to the new version of the product, including SAP. Commenting on the new product, Vice President of Global Sourcing and Employer Branding, Matthew Jeffrey, says, “LinkedIn offers the insights we need to get a better view of the talent in our key markets in the UK and worldwide. SAP is very excited about the newest version of Recruiter. It is even more intuitive, enabling us to enter the names of top performers in our teams and instantly get back a list of professionals with similar skills and experience. The right data insights combined with helping us find the best talent as quickly and efficiently as possible is a powerful combination.”
So how does the new LinkedIn Recruiter do it? Here are three stand-out changes to look out for to make the most of the new features:
1. Replicate the best hires
For many recruiters looking for their next top hire, it’s often easier to say who they’re looking for rather than what skills they want. With the new tool, users can type in the name of top employees into Recruiter and its smart matching algorithms will serve up a list of professionals with similar skills and experience. In Recruiter these are called Ideal Candidates and can be a quick and effective way to let the data do the hard work on finding great talent.
2. Assess talent pools in real time
For recruiters involved in planning new growth strategies for their company, one of the first questions should be how are they going to effectively find the right talent to make the business’ initiatives a success. LinkedIn Recruiter can now show users the available talent pool available to them based on the specific skills and experience they’re looking for. The number of available candidates will immediately update depending on how broad or narrow they make their search, giving them an accurate idea of how easy or hard it will be to find the skills they need.
3. Prioritise the most-likely candidates first
Filling critical roles is often about speed as much as the right skills and experience. The new LinkedIn Recruiter helps highlight the candidates most likely to respond to a recruiter by looking at the digital cues that suggest they might show an interest in an organisation. This includes candidates that already have connections within the company, those who followed its Company Page or liked, commented on, or shared a relevant update, and even previous job applicants. These ‘Spotlight’ candidates are two- to-three times more likely to respond to a recruiter, increasing the speed of finding the best talent.
So far, employers using the tool have seen some impressive success. Initial results show a 17 per cent reduction in the number of searches, a 42 per cent uplift in profiles viewed per search, and recruiters are saving 23 per cent more of the profiles they find. Together, these numbers indicate that recruiters are finding more relevant candidates with less effort and in a shorter amount of time.
Dan Dackombe is the sales director for LinkedIn Talent Solutions EMEA. Image: Shutterstock
