Under the Bonnet – How do recruiters use Linkedin, and will it put you out of business?

Simon RoderickAbout recruitment, Resources for hiring managers

Fram Search - how to write a good LinkedIn profile

Under the Bonnet – in this series, our MD, Simon Roderick, lifts the lid on the workings of a recruitment firm.

I often get asked the above and I think my thoughts are “I hope not, and I don’t think so. Oh, and yes all recruiters use it”. There is no doubt that Linkedin has been a game changer for the industry. For me, the biggest effect is that it has made people more visible and every recruiter can “have a go” at being a headhunter. So many inexperienced recruiters, or agencies, have no experience of headhunting and to an extent it solves one of their major problems i.e. identifying candidates, but I think they are still a long way off being a headhunter. Regardless of the industry you work in it has made decision makers easier to identify and is a key part of everyone’s online strategy. It’s a tool, a very valuable tool, and I’m more happy that it exists than worried.

So who uses it in recruitment and why aren’t I worried about it? Well the answer is I suspect that everyone in recruitment now uses it from the leading international headhunters to local agencies, but the key thing for me is knowing what to do with the information. I can only talk about recruitment firms, though I suspect the same issues appear in most serviced based companies, but once a prospective candidate has been identified the recruiter has to first approach them. For some reason a lot of inexperienced recruiters don’t like making approach calls, they also don’t know what to say (and do their clients want to be represented in this way), and then what? Often they don’t know. However, being a real headhunter means really understanding your market. It’s all very well generating a candidate, but you need to track movers, benchmark, screen, and test individuals, and to do this you need to be a specialist. That’s why Fram are wealth & asset management specialists rather than being financial services generalists. We understand wealth & asset management, and know the market participants, but we don’t know anything about the Lloyds market for example.

So I think Linkedin is a good thing for Fram and other companies, but it’s not a threat because the specialists already had the information anyway (it just saves us a bit of time).

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