By Jason Burns, Head of Recruitment
With 750-plus employees and many roles to fill each year, OAMPS can justify subscribing to the LinkedIn Recruiter tool at a cost of that barely equates to one executive recruitment assignment. LinkedIn Recruiter includes a powerful search tool for finding candidates with the right professional profile (e.g. years of experience, past and present employers, job titles, seniority etc.), candidate relationship management tools and the ability to contact people via InMail.
But you don’t need the Rolls Royce solution to successfully incorporate LinkedIn into your business’ recruitment strategy.
Here are some useful ways to use LinkedIn:
- Create a LinkedIn Business account, which allows you to do advanced searches for people with the right skills in your location, for a modest monthly fee.
- Post a job ad that appears in LinkedIn’s 'Jobs you may be interested in' email and online updates for people in your target market. The cost to do this is around $200. Using the sponsored jobs upgrade will give your advertisement a higher profile.
- Send InMail to people in your network about roles you are trying to fill and ask them to recommend people they know with the right skills and experience.
- Join relevant LinkedIn groups, which will give you access to a greater number of potential candidates in your target market.
- Post status updates about roles you are trying to fill.
- Create a LinkedIn company profile and keep it up to date to present a professional image. Encourage people to follow your company.
- Screen and verify a potential candidate's credentials and skills before creating a short-list of people to interview.
LinkedIn is best suited for recruiting professionals and people with an established work track record. For entry level jobs, word of mouth is still often the best option or you can place an ad on Seek.
Once you've found some potential candidates, how do you work out who is the best person for your role? Before going any further, map out the qualities that are desirable for the position.
For example, qualities that good brokers have in common include: an understanding of how businesses tick, good negotiation and sales skills, desire to grow the business, tenaciousness, a caring nature, and the ability to work in a team.
I routinely also ask our receptionist what the candidate was like before/after the interview – when they’re off guard. This can provide real insights into a person's behaviour patterns.
If you are recruiting for a leadership role, it's often more important to get people with the right skills and qualities than industry experience. For example, OAMPS has successfully recruited candidates to leadership roles from non-insurance backgrounds, such as banking and pharmaceutical companies. While you can quite easily train people about the technical aspects of a role, it's a lot more difficult to turn someone into a good team player and good corporate citizen.
The OAMPS recruitment team also routinely does SHL personality and aptitude tests to get more insight into a candidate's behaviours and motivators. Using psych tests, like SHL, are useful for confirming information you have picked up in the interview.
The last step in the recruitment process is the reference check. The reference check is also a great opportunity to ask questions relating to any potential deficiencies identified in the psych testing.
Listen to the referee's tone: how comfortable do they sound giving the reference? And remember, one solid reference from a previous manager is better than a handful of recommendations from the candidate’s colleagues or associates.
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