Enhancing the Recruiter and Candidate Experience with LinkedIn Integr…

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An inspiring journey into the world of LinkedIn technology

The world is changing fast.. 5 simple words yet a truly powerful statement.. I’m sure each of us here today thinks we understand the concept of this but lets pause for a moment, and really think about what this means..

In the past 60 seconds (basically the time it took me to read this slide) that:

250 babies are born
Lightning struck the earth 360 times
Oprah Winfrey made $523 (the average working class person makes $0.013)
NIKE makes $36,505

Pretty crazy right! So what’s this all mean?

Change is happening constantly, change is all around us.. This was just a 60 second snap shot and you can see what took place..

Recruiting is changing as well.. (change to next slide)

Candidates have more choices today than ever before. Practically feels like every day there is some new latest and greatest app to download or site to join.. their choices grow exponentially every single day. Which mean we need to make sure we are not only keeping up but staying 1 step ahead!

So what's this look like from a recruiters perspective.. well let’s think about how we used to recruit not all that long ago.. A fair amount of us in here in this room probably kept or may even still have an old (possibly slightly rusty) metal filing cabinet jam packed with the next hottest talent we wanted to join our team. As technology changed and we looked to move forward we began entering those paper resumes into the latest and great tracking method there was, an database! Now we could keep those perhaps a bit out of date resumes better organized… still out of date but organized non the less.. As with most things however no sooner did we get close to entering all our info into the database then technology changed.. Again… Now we were still keeping those databases somewhat updated but we also begin to explore proactive recruiting.. Oooh sounds fancy! Basically we welcomed the introduction of Job Channels. With the introduction of Job Channels print media took a bit of a back seat to the awesome power of the World Wide Web! Now we could start to empower prospects to be able to search our jobs our companies and approach us if interested. As will all good things, this method although still being used today, has now itself taken more of a backseat to the current way in which business has shifted.. Social Media Recruiting…

If you’re still part of the 28% of men or 24% of women that aren’t on-board I have news for you, Social media is here to stay and embracing the tools to harness its power is the key to success!

Social recruiting should be about marketing your brand and engaging with all of the people who may be your clients and candidates today, and tomorrow
One of the most common misconceptions we still see about LinkedIn is companies continuing to view and use it more as a job board. However, to fully understand the potential of LinkedIn we need to course correct and start viewing LinkedIn as social media recruiting platform.

Lets take a moment to pause and think about the purpose and reason as to why we use social media platforms. Take for instance one I’m sure you are all familiar with, Facebook as an example, the idea is to build a community around you of friends and like-minded people that you then in turn can communicate with and share content that is relevant and engaging to.

LinkedIn is no different. It’s about building a followers ecosystem around you and your business of relevant contacts (hint hint potential candidates) who are interested in you, your company, and how you might be able to help them transform their career.

In today’s society we are all experts at researching and have so much more valuable information at our fingertips that studies indicate that 57% of the decision to engage is now made long before any actual contact with you or your business.
The Social web has changed how we all make decisions, including looking for a job. Candidates expect relevant and personalized information delivered to them rather that having to hunt for it.

I like to describe the decision to engage as Social Research, similar to what most of us do when shopping:
Bear with me here - What’s the first thing we all do when shopping online? We review the product (a.k.a. we read the job description) Get an idea of what it is this company is offering..
What’s the next thing we do? Review the seller (in this case the seller is the hiring company) we want to know as much as possible about this company including what's going on with the business, where their focus is, who its employees are, what the culture is like, do I know anyone working there.. We want to be comfortable that this company offering this job is a solid bet in our minds
The final step in this process is to read others reviews (member shared content, company updates, employee testimonials, job recommendations etc..)

And finally after all of this once we truly feel like we understand what’s its like to be part of this organization at the core of it, to walk into work on Monday morning only then do we decide either Yes, I am interested in learning more and will apply to that job or reach out to connect or No, this just is not a fit for me personally at this time.

As you can see leveraging social media can have a truly transformative effect on not only you and your business but all those your associated with as well. To help simplify this process even further LinkedIn has developed a framework which we are going to share with you that will enable you to easily start to implement some of the tools available today.

The first part of this frame work is Build: The Build pillar is really focused on developing a solid network of followers and strengthening your talent brand.

The second pillar introduces us to the concept of Engage – We want to make sure that you all are able to easily share all that wonderful content you have both on and off of LinkedIn with your newly developed follower network.

The final pillar dives into the Recruit aspect – one that I'm sure is near and dear to all of you. We want to make sure that not only are we building a solid foundation of followers and content but that we are able to help you streamline your workflow and ultimately develop and targeted pool of engaged candidates!

Sound good? Everyone excited? So lets go!

INTRO: LinkedIn offers a number of easy-to-use tools to help amplify everything you're already doing today. Using these products will help further advance and strengthen your talent brand, drive more relevant engagement with candidates and members, equip you with tools to streamline your workflow and ultimately lead to a greater recruiting experience

Personal story: My daughter’s first day at school, by the time I dropped her off (and the smile on the picture kind of went away) the picture had 171 likes in a little over 1 hour, only from my friends and family (my followers!). It was a wake up moment, a large number of people connected to me participated of an important event.

Followers are an actively engaged audience that is raising their hand and saying Yes! I would love to learn more about your organization! 79% of member’s will follow a company for job opportunities.

Building followers creates your audience, people waiting to hear from you, to receive news and opportunities. Followers constitute a prime audience and candidate pool. Followers are your company’s friends

I am sure that you will hear about followers in more sessions in Talent Connect (yes, it is that important!). Today we are going to focus on a little, very simple to use yet very powerful tool to add followers

Why Followers Matter
88% of members would follow a company.
71% of members will follow a company for jobs.
78% of company followers are more likely to respond to an InMail.
Members will follow up to 6 companies on average.
64% of followers would follow companies indefinitely.
Followers are 2.5x more likely to recommend your business.
Members are 61% more likely to share information as a result of following your company
79% of members are interested in job opportunities from companies they are following

We are going to shift the conversation a bit towards our technology tools and we will start with a few plugins. When we talk about plugins we are referring to simple to implement functionality that you can add to your website and to your content. Best of all, our plugins are free to use!

The Follow Plugin!

The Follow plugin is super easy to use. Yep, copy paste easy to use. It is 5 lines of code and will help you grow your follower base.

Here we have an example from our friends at Disney. They actually built a Connect Hub, where potential candidates can choose to follow many of their children companies

This is just a quick example. I encourage you to think about what you can do with it, pages, campaigns, Be creative. It is powerful!

Disney also implemented our Company Insider plugin. And this is a great transition into our next topic. This plugin allows you to see people from your network who work at the company. It adds a personal connection. A personal experience.

Now, let’s leave followers for a moment. I want to talk about an activity that we all do in LinkedIn.

Yep, our number one activity, members looking at members profiles.

We are interested on what people are doing, where they are, what is new. It is a warm, friendly experience, we see a (almost always) friendly picture, we know how we are connected to the person, and we see the achievements in their career.

Now, if you look at the same for the recruiting world, it is 10x higher. This is HUGE. There is always the warm connection to the person who can help you find your next play.

We have tools to help you bring some of the warm, personal LinkedIn experience to your site.

At LinkedIn we have several plugins to add the professional “warmth of LinkedIn” to your site. We have other tools in our developer site (e.g. Company Insider, Company Profile, Full Profile)

Let’s look at another one of our friendly and easy to implement plugins. The Member Profile plugin. It displays LinkedIn member profiles on your corporate website, giving visitors a personal connection to the people in your organization. The plugin provides a more social context to the content you already feature. It also has an easy way to access professional profiles for the members of your organization and to build connections to personal candidates

Some examples of how you might use this plugin would be on an executive staff page, highlighting the author of a blog post or even providing further context on LinkedIn members mentioned or quoted within a news article or blog post.

So you have built a broad and network of followers.. Now what? It is crucial once you have these follower that you keep your audience connected and engaged. I am sure most of us in here have been down that road in which we joined a group that sounded really exciting very much in-line with our priorities only to never read or receive anything relevant and ultimately loose interest. That obviously is quite the opposite of what we want. It is important to encourage your followers to want to learn about your company, about your business and your culture all while giving them a personalized and relevant experience. We are going to take a look at a few tools available to help you accomplish that.. But before we do that I wanted to share a quote with you..

Chris Hoyt, Talent Acquisition Leader for PepsiCo, once said…

In that one statement Chris exemplifies everything we are talking about here today..

2 billion! Does anyone have any idea what that number represents? It’s how many updates are seen weekly across LinkedIn. And this isn’t just people chatting about the weather, This is professional content, insights and opportunities to transform people’s lives.

The time to engage your followers is now. Establish your company as a thought leader. Start building your talent community.

Show of hands, how many people out there have shared something on LinkedIn? One of the best ways to engage your community and keep them engaged with you is by sharing content. Take advantage of all that great content you have not only on LinkedIn but off LinkedIn as well and share it with your growing talent community on LinkedIn. We make this process seamless with our IN-SHARE button, now you can provide the opportunity for anyone to share your content with their networks across all of LinkedIn

I don’t know about you but I love when I’m on LinkedIn and I go to visit a companies page only to be presented with tailored content relevant to me specifically. It makes my experience a much more personalized one and definitely encourages me to want to spent a little extra time looking around. Sharing content is important, sharing tailored content is imperative! In addition to the wonderful Share button we spoke of previously you can also utilize our Sign In With LinkedIn application to ensure everyone visiting your site gets their own personalized experience.

When you utilize the Sign In with LinkedIn you are able to quickly determine who this person is (are they a CEO, a manager a student) , what their background is, where did they go to school, do they know anyone at your company and so on. Your able to gather enough information that your application can make intelligent targeted recommendations to this candidate providing that custom tailored experience. A wonderful addition to the Sign In with LinkedIn plugin is the Jobs You May Be Interested In. While this is available without using the Sign In plugin if you use it in addition to you are then not only offering relevant content to your audience but targeted job opportunities as well, double whammy!

Finally, let’s move to the area that you know extremely well. Recruiting. Through this journey we have seen tools to build your company’s brand and your followers base. Engage them and provide them a personal experience. Let’s now look at how we can help you in your recruiting process.

Now we are going to look at some API solutions. APIs are basically a way for your system to ask nicely LinkedIn for information.

Let’s go back to jobs for a bit and let’s look at the job application process. We wanted to streamline this to and make its easy for qualified candidates to apply for your jobs using their LinkedIn profile.

Let’s start in a job posting. You will include a beautiful LinkedIn button to allow candidates to apply using their profile. They will be asked to enter their LinkedIn credentials and to authorize you to get their Profile data. You have control on what to do with the information. You can choose to use it to prepopulate a form and ask the candidate additional questions. Or you can choose to collect more data and send it directly to your database as a full application.

Pros:
Avoids tedious data entry
Our data shows that click-through rate of applications with LinkedIn is twice that of redirect applications
Ability to prepopulate information in your site and create a custom experience. A happy experience

Now let’s look at the Recruiter experience. Very likely your teams spend time in your local system and in LinkedIn. The process involves repeating searches, lots of Alt-Tab (Altabbing? Can we make up the word?)

Cross-system awareness (fancy name) is our solution for streamlining the process. It is a solution that allow you to have a connected ecosystem between your application and LinkedIn.

Imagine your system is on the left and you look this very promising candidate, Jeff Weiner. Of course you want to see his LinkedIn profile. Instead of “Altabbing” you will just click and a “widget” with Jeff’s information appears magically in your system. The widget has also some very handy links to open the candidate in Recruiter, Save to a Project, Send and InMail and Update Me

Now let’s look at the experience within LinkedIn Recruiter. When your team is working within the LinkedIn Recruiter world, search results will display indicators to let you know which candidates exist in your system.

You will also see an identifier when looking at a candidate profile. And, the anti-alttabing, you have a way to directly go back to your ATS system.

As they will say on an Apple presentation, one more thing: If you qualify, CSA is free in all these ATS systems. If you see your ATS talk to your ATS service rep and tell them: “I want CSA”

If you don’t see your ATS here, too bad. I am sorry, that joke works in Spanish. If you don’t see it there talk to your rep and encourage them to connect with us.

To close, I believe that a successful presentation should address two questions:

So what?
The tools we have reviewed today are powerful and can help you transform your approach using LinkedIn
Now what?
Get the Follower Button
Engage your RM and start discussing how to integrate these tools into your social strategy
Now get inspired. Talk to your teams, use all these resources we have for you. Make these tools your new best friends!

And with that, we open it up for Q&A

Enhancing the Recruiter and Candidate Experience with LinkedIn Integrations | Talent Connect San Francisco 2014

LinkedIn Talent Solutions

Enhancing the Recruiter and Candidate Experience with LinkedIn Integrations | Talent Connect San Francisco 2014