Today, about 95 percent of recruiters, aka headhunters, utilize LinkedIn as a major sourcing tool to find candidates to present to their client companies seeking top-tier talent. But if you want to be found by one of them, it’s important to understand how they use LinkedIn to source their candidates and position yourself accordingly.
RiseSmart’s Kimberly Schneiderman presented results of a recent extensive poll of headhunters to the Career Thought Leaders Conference in Baltimore earlier this year. Confirming popular belief, the poll revealed that LinkedIn is, by far, regarded as the best consistent source of quality candidates online.
Meanwhile, keyword searches are the most common way of finding ideal job candidates with the right skills and accomplishments, followed by searching previous employers, searching through contacts and then searching contacts of their contacts.
At the same conference, Shally Steckerl, one of the leading sourcers helping Fortune 500 companies efficiently find talent, suggested that in order to figure out what keywords to utilize in your profile, find a job ad for a position you seek or one similar to the one you have, and use the URL to create a Wordle diagram of the important words. Make sure to use them in your profile summary and everywhere else on your profile, as well. Matching as many keywords to a job type as you can will help recruiters locate your profile.
In this article I outline six other ways recruiters find candidates, including: industry groups, searching rival companies, observing who is recommending and endorsing people, finding people similar to those that they already know, finding alumni from specific colleges or universities and using Google to search LinkedIn’s public profiles.
Make certain that you have a complete and compelling LinkedIn profile, and read the full article.
Happy hunting!