New Features in LinkedIn Company Pages Adds Visual Excitement

LinkedIn has launched a Products and services tab, which is a new feature being launched by them for all companies. The Products and features tab enhances the layout flexibility of profiles. This makes the interaction more visual and encourages a broader use for the people in the company page.

Company profile on LinkedIn allows us to use the products and the services channel to highlight the kinds of projects and products that new hires will be working on. This thereby helps us to connect it to the project and the job opening posted in the company profile. This not only helps in giving a strong company presentation but also adds a higher visual excitement to the end user.

It’s even more critical that the message be as authentic and honest as possible, since LinkedIn members can post reviews and recommendations.

It’s a strategic move by LinkedIn, to show the companies in the best possible authentic manner as users can post reviews and recommendations in it. This helps in recruiting, marketing and sales a lot as it highlights a lot about the company’s technology, applications, services, product portfolio to the best possible extent.

This helps us in understanding, what it is the company is all about. Because when LinkedIn began allowing members to follow specific companies, close to one million companies are now being followed by more than 30 million users. Now with the launch of the rebranded Company Pages, LinkedIn intends to remain the dominant business-oriented online professional network in the planet.

LinkedIn beyond a doubt has established its identity as a career-focused site. Social media surveys, found that among college students 75 percent use LinkedIn predominantly for career purposes, whereas 76 percent use Facebook purely for social purposes.

 

 

Job Board Recruiting vs. Social Media Recruiting

Social media recruiting is gaining a brisk momentum. It’s not just in one channel but in multiple channels as the technology is freely available for everyone to actively get involved.

It has become a norm nowadays, that recruiting via social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter etc are picking up at an aggressive pace.

Companies are quickly coming around to it, as the candidates are already there and recruitment agencies are slowly implementing the fact that they need to be using the channel, apart from traditional job board search.

The question however, everybody has in mind is that, do job board companies really want social media recruiting to happen or is it becoming a threat they have to live with.There are some job board sites that have embraced social media big time and are genuinely using it effectively, this is for the reason that they have taken the time to understand the channels and how they are to be used for their benefits.

But, I believe that the majority still doesn’t understand it and pray that social media dies tomorrow or soon, which is not going to be the scenario.

There are two primary objectives of a job board – to get jobs placed on its board and candidates visiting the board to apply for the jobs. So why wouldn’t they embrace social media to help them? Why are so many still not doing anything social at all?

When it comes to objectives, Job boards has 2 main objectives, that’s either

1. Get jobs placed on its board.
2. Inducing Candidates visiting the Job board to apply for the jobs.

However, the fact remains that a good number of job board portals are out there blasting jobs on social media sites at random, thereby killing its effectiveness for job seekers. This not only damages their online brand reputation but also kills the job search interest levels among potential job seekers.

Job Boards are not active in ‘Candidate engagement’; hence they lose out on candidate retention, whereas social media recruiting is about candidate engagement and retention.

 

Small Changes in your Recruiting System can go a long way in succesful Candidate Engagement

Candidate engagement is increasing day by day. Staffing companies and organizations are ever increasingly creating a conducive stance wherein candidates can directly submit their resumes and even know the status of their resumes. The recruiters are going a step ahead wherein they get back to the candidate personally after they fill in their application or after giving the interview.

These sessions helps in solving a problem from scratch and brainstorm how an organization should look and act to a candidate. This stance helps to create the organization the leader in candidate engagement.

Candidate engagement however has a few obligations, which must be seen or taken care of by the organization, If it is to be succesful in it. They are

Setting expectations early :- Organizations after receiving a resume upload should begin turning on the auto-reply feature within the ATS. There is no reason why you shouldn’t turn this on today if you have this feature. I was surprised by how many people in the audience were not using it or were not aware of it.

Organization should set their expectations, and set a higher productive stance wherein every candidate submission is replied back via their ATS. The key however is to concentrate on the messaging of this auto-reply and how long the process will take.

Should all candidates be treated equally? – First off, I think an auto-reply should be sent to all candidates that submit an application. But after that should you feel compelled to treat everyone the same? In a perfect world, sure but our world is far from perfect. If you have limited labor resources, I’d recommend putting candidates in tiers. Candidates that don’t fit the job description should be sent a generic rejection email, which is quite easy to do in your ATS.

Candidates that you interview should always receive a personal call that they didn’t receive the job. And finalists should receive a conversation from a recruiter to gauge their interest in future positions in the company as they would still be good fits for the company in the near future.

Candidate engagement is not that difficult. There are a number of small things that you can do in order to improve the experience of the candidates that are coming through your recruitment marketing system every day. The key is doing it in a channelized manner than just doing it for the sake of it .