LinkedIn Recruiter Overview
We commented in earlier articles about the 2012 Forbes piece, LinkedIn is Disrupting The Corporate Market, which reported sharp rises in revenues from LinkedIn’s Recruiter, their corporate recruiting service. Revenues grew by 136% to $84.9 million in Q4 2011, and it is now the fastest growing public facing recruiting service.
But, the real news was that experts are projecting that LinkedIn Revenues could match Monster’s within the year. 2012 could be the year that LinkedIn splits the two front runners of corporate recruitment and makes it into the big league. Hardly quiet.
While LinkedIn has a multi-faceted offering, one of the key services that is driving its growth is LinkedIn Recruiter, so we thought it would be a good time to bring this product into the spotlight. See below for the run down on LinkedIn’s corporate recruiting solution, Recruiter.
LinkedIn Recruiter offers three forms of functionality to recruiters: ‘Access’, ‘Contact’ and ‘Manage’ and we have reviewed each of the functions below.
While standard LinkedIn users (non fee paying) can search LinkedIn’s database, (currently containing 150,000,000 members ), they only have about 4 special search criteria and can only access candidates in the search results who are in their network.
If you are signed up to ‘LinkedIn Recruiter‘ you get access to an additional 7 search criteria, including company size, function, seniority level, recently joined, years of experience and fortune 1000.
As well as this, fee paying LinkedIn Recruiter membership means that you can see candidate results that are outside of your network so you have a much wider potential resource pool to choose from. How agonising is it when you find 10 candidates for a job yet 9 of them are out of network and not contactable?
In addition, you get to view 1,000 profiles per search instead of 100 which is what you get with the non fee-paying membership. This features means you can remove that frustration of getting to the 10 page limit of the standard LinkedIn member search, having only found one or even no suitable candidates.
Contact
Many of us spend much of your lives (sometimes too much), building our LinkedIn networks. But no matter how big it gets, you will still find yourself in the frustrating position of having ‘out of network’ candidates in your search results. LinkedIn Recruiter gifts you with 50 InMails a month which allow you to contact any candidate you like regardless of whether they are in your network or not, making it a great antidote to the ‘out of network’ frustrations. What is worth mentioning here though is that if your InMails go unanswered after 7 days, they are credited back to you and you can roll them over each month if not used.
Recruiter also has tools to help you work efficiently, for example, you can create up to 50 search alerts so you can find talent automatically. Also, you can send 1-to-Many InMails and you can store and use e-mail templates to contact candidate’s faster.
Manage
LinkedIn Recruiter contains workflow management folders in the form of project folders where you can store searches.
You can also set reminders on your profile to prompt you to follow up with promising candidates.
There is also some great collaboration functionality as team members can get visibility into each other’s projects, notes and communication history with candidates. This helps team members to stand in for other team members when they are away and avoids duplication of effort.
Also, when a recruiter leaves, their sourcing activity can easily be assigned to another team member so all effort and information is not lost.
LinkedIn Recruiter’s features give you more powerful search functionality and greater capacity to contact candidates than standard membership. It also has a good level of work-flow management and collaboration tools. If you are finding limitations with the current standard membership model of LinkedIn, then I think that LinkedIn Recruiter is as good an option as any of the other paying options in the market place – and in some ways better due to the quality, depth and sheer volume of the candidate profiles.