Lots of recruiters have a LinkedIn Recruiter Licence. Indeed many of my clients do, or are considering investing. I’ve written several blogs about recruiters not “getting” the value of LinkedIn:
Recruiters: Don’t Expect a Return on Investment from LinkedIn (part 1)
Recruiters: Don’t Expect a Return on Investment from LinkedIn (part 2)
And now I’m about to go into a 3rd episode and talk specifically about LinkedIn Recruiter. (And if ever there was a time to discuss the placement of the colon.)
Having a LinkedIn Recruiter licence – Just like having a Porsche
When I work with recruiters on their social media strategy I tend to get a bit car mad (Lewis Hamilton has done me some favours this year). I often equate having a LinkedIn Recruiter Licence to having a Porsche. I’ve done my research too and many recruiters would love (or indeed have) a Porsche.
There’s going to be all sorts of Porsche and car analogies in this blog. Tune your valves and check your mirrors!
Imagine this Porsche was a company car. The recruiter I worked for in the early 2000s had one – you “won” it for a month if you smashed target.
Imagine if you had a company Porsche:
You’d have a flipping huge smile on your face if you got to drive it (but I rarely see recruiters look delighted when they’re using LinkedIn Recruiter)
You wouldn’t just give it to your mates to rag (but you sometimes share a LinkedIn Recruiter licence)
Your boss wouldn’t let you get in unless you’d got a valid driving licence (but there are 1000s of recruiters using the licence and have not been trained to use it, and no-one is studying their usage reports and holding them accountable for their use of the system)
You’d be expected to keep it clean (but any recruiters are not saving searches, setting up alerts or using projects)
You’d win the race, rather than draw with the freebie LinkedIn.com recruiters (but I still see a lack of revenue generated by this licence, and a “it’s ok to break even” approach by some who are not seeing or expecting value)
LinkedIn Recruiter: Get out of the Porsche and “get on the phone”
Technology being disruptive is old news. Never before have the technology options which the average recruiter has access to so paralysed the recruiting process. Recruitment leaders are hoarse with “get on the phone”.
When it comes to LinkedIn Recruiter this is often the norm in a recruitment firm:
Not enough licences to go around and they are shared amongst the team
The “all the gear no idea” approach to the licence – barely scraping the surface of what this licence can offer
Lots of searching and InMailing, not enough clever use of the features such as Update Me, alerts, projects…
Nowhere near enough training on the product
The recruitment CRM barely getting a look in on the talent contacted / placed via the LinkedIn licence. Hence no real understanding of the source of the fee
…and with many recruiters handing the licence around like a tray of chocolates after dinner there’s not enough buy-in to the product for it to make its mark.
Then the renewal comes around and some recruitment leaders renew due to fear of missing out rather than tangible return on investment.
Buying a Porsche seems a lot more exciting!
Breaking even does not buy you a Porsche!
I also regularly hear that a great measurement of LinkedIn Recruiter is “breaking even”. As long as the recruiter makes a placement, and hence paid for the licence, then all is well with the world.
This clearly goes against the average recruitment leaders’ approach to making money. Breaking even does not buy you a Porsche!
The strapline on the LinkedIn Recruiter landing page on LinkedIn’s website is “Find and Engage the Best Talent”. I would imagine if Porsche could be that direct, they may use the same strapline for their cars? 😉
Indeed many recruiters have that goal day-to-day, and in the pub on a Friday / Saturday night.
How to treat your LinkedIn Recruiter licence like a company Porsche
Give it to the people who demonstrate that they deserve it – not simply because they have asked for it. (Want a Porsche? Earn a Porsche!)
Train, train, train. (Driving test / licence)
Set goals for how it should be used – never assume that if you give someone some tech they’ll organically slot it in to their already stretched workflow. (Highway code)
Study usage reports monthly and either nip bad behaviour in the bud with training / alignment of expectations, or take the licence away. (Servicing / MOT / Mileage check).
How are they currently using social and sourcing tools? If they are pretty shoddy and don’t connect to the CRM enough, having a LinkedIn Recruiter licence won’t change their behaviour. (Are you about to give your Porsche to a recruiters with a bashed-up, dirty car?)
Get users to sign a contract with you – you wouldn’t hand over the keys to your company Porsche without s signature and a sanity / driving licence check.
The LinkedIn Recruiter licence is often seen as an “expensive” bit of kit, but it is a tiny fraction of what the average recruitment leader spends on their IT / advertising / salary budget.
Having higher expectations of what a LinkedIn Recruiter licence can do, and asking your team to deliver, is crucial if you are to engage well with this product and not just see it as an inevitable cost of running a recruitment business. The investment is not just about the invoice you pay. It’s the time you spend on it and whether you can really attribute an improvement in your bottom line to it.
Using it well could even help your recruiters buy that Porsche (perhaps even a 918 Spyder.)
(See part four of this LinkedIn series here)
Get ROI from LinkedIn
We run LinkedIn for Recruiters courses for time-starved recruiters, who think they have a handle on LinkedIn, but want to improve their profile, increase their relevant application response and place more jobs.
HIIT Us, Recruiters!
Our high intensity interval training - Recruitment HIIT - helps recruiters source, convert quicker, and develop healthy pipelines, and recruitment marketers attract, engage, and retain candidates, generate clients, and colleagues (3Cs).
TRY RECRUITMENT HIIT
Book an appointment in my diary to discuss marketing ROI
BOOK A CALL TO DISCUSS RECRUITMENT TRAINING
media centre
Read more-
Blog
How Many Candidates (and Clients) Do Recruiters Really Need?
Recruitment leaders and their resourcers / recruiters need to read this blog for insights on how much data they really need, and how much data they can realistically manage, to run a successful desk and recruitment business.We’re all human (even recruiters) and we all have limits. In recruiting world, our limits can be how many jobs we can work, how many calls we can make, how many temps we can manage. One significant human limit is our ability to nurture relationships. Data = RelationshipsRecruitment is a relationship business. A recruiter’s job is to build and maintain relationships. Candidates need managing, clients need managing, colleagues need managing. Dunbar tells us that humans have relationship limits – we have “a number” we can manage. Robin Dunbar is a Professor Emeritus of Evolutionary Psychology of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at Oxford Uni he knows a few things about human behaviour. Think of your relationships a bit like a layered onion with you in the middle. 5 loved ones 15 good friends 50 friends 150 meaningful relationships 500 acquaintances 1500 people you can recognise People can move in and out of these layers. What is Dunbar’s Number? And What’s It Got to Do with Recruitment? Where does a “typical” recruiter sit in their ideal candidate / contact’s layer? And where do their candidates and contacts sit? Recruitment Leaders! What should you be considering if you want to maximise the value of your database, and the relationships you want to maximise, optimise, monetise? How should you focus on and nurture the right relationships? What’s the Number of Candidates and Contacts a Recruiter Can Actively Manage? Dunbar suggests that humans are capable of building, nurturing and maintaining 150 good meaningful and trusted relationships. Of course, there are variations to this, such as extroverts vs introverts and social networks – for example women tend to have more contacts in the closest layers. Dunbar v Recruitment Dunbar’s study isn’t focused on recruitment or recruiters, but it’s definitely food for thought. 150 meaningful relations is not that many people when you consider the average recruiter has a database in the 1000s. But could you really market your recruitment business on a database of “acquaintances” or “people you recognise”? Where do your candidates and clients fall within these categories? Have you got any in the magic 150 “meaningful contacts”? Is your database segmented in such a way, or do you have a “data dump” which needs a good clean?[link to clean webinar]. Recruitment in the Good Old Days Before tech and data began paralysing recruitment (too much / never enough), recruitment was much more of a relationship business. You knew your candidates, their dog’s names, their kid’s ages. Relationships were easier to sustain, they were more valuable, and we charged more for our services. It’s likely that Dunbar would say a recruiter pre-social media had 150 meaningful relationships with candidate and clients, and perhaps even some friends? Now with infinite data and technology allowing for massively increased reach and volume, relationships, ironically, are a harder to start and sustain. Are you / your recruitment teams engaging with the right people, or just lots of candidates? (Too many applicants, not enough candidates?) Are you working the right opportunities, or just a list of one-off jobs? (Too many jobs, not enough sales?) Is Your CRM Simply a Datadump of Strangers? Recruiters who try to maintain too many relationships actually limit their own success. They dilute the relationships they’re trying to build, resulting in weaker, less meaningful, and less valuable relationships. Could Dunbar help you run your recruitment business? For example: Recruiters who run a busy temp desk and managing 100+ temps might not have the capacity to take on more or even do other activities such as Business Development or Sourcing. 360-degree recruiters will have more relationships to manage than a 180-degree recruiter, so this could mean a less focused strategy and outcome. Is it always necessary to hire another recruiter to manage more relationships, or could tech do some heavy lifting? 4 Ways to Be Smart with Recruitment Contacts Social Networks can help. Publishing content to your “connections” can help keep you in and around the Acquaintances and People You Recognise category. Your goal, though, should be to get your ideal contacts on to your CRM so you can more actively work them. Ideally you should be aiming to nurture them in the 150 “meaningful contact” space! Your Recruitment CRM/ATS (ideally powered by automation) also has ways to identify and categorise your relationships. Status fields, rating and grading fields are great places to start and will enable smart ways to manage and work the data. Automation (and recruiters) can keep these vital fields current. Automation is helping Recruiters identify, engage, nurture (and monetise) Acquaintances and People You Recognise and capitalising on these relationships. In the automation projects we deliver we are creating functional data so recruiters can focus on segments of contacts and candidates. They can then “work” their data, rather than just collect it. Your recruiters (ideally powered by automation/CRM) need to keep this data updated to ensure you can track, manage and support where necessary. This should also protect your relationships when recruiters move on. Final Thoughts Engaging and nurturing your candidates and clients is an important part of the recruitment lifecycle. Recruiters often struggle with “too much data, too many systems, not enough process”. Any help and support you can provide to your recruiters to create focus, so relationships are stronger and profitable, is crucial. How could you use Dunbar’s theory to help you create focus, function, and sustainability?(Big thanks to Louise at UK Recruiter for initially posting this blog.)Bullhorn ROI + Trained Happy Recruiters = More SalesWe pride ourselves on helping recruitment leaders achieve Bullhorn ROI. We create a Bullhorn1st vision, reduce the need for other tech, optimise Bullhorn, automate their sales-prevention processes and data, and train recruiters to trust it and use it.ARRANGE A FREE CONSULTATION NOW
-
Blog
Automation Tip - Nail Your Date Ranges in Automation Lists
We've got an automation tip to help you ensure that you can really target the data (candidates and clients) you need to source, sell to, and place.We help recruiters to source quicker, and sell more, through our Automation Buddy program. Automation can positively transform a recruitment business - when it works. But when it doesn't work it feels like it simply costs money and keeps you reliant on Linkedin, Job Boards and other expensive data sources and tech.Don't Miss Out On a Hot Date (Or Sale)!When you build automations, they can be date-related, but I often see lists that aren't quite right, date ranges are setup incorrectly, and this means that you'll be missing out on vital sales (and candidate) opportunities. This can really affect automation ROI (and RoE - return on effort!)Damn!In my recent "5 Automations to Make You Money" webinar I explored how to create good quality lists to target your time and attention and keep hungry recruiters busy with the right calls. For example, you'll want to target lapsed clients, wake them up, and get them back into paying clients. These automations really need to work!But I have a fix for you to ensure that your lists and automations really drive revenue.Watch My Quick 1-Minute Automation Video, Nail Your Date Ranges, and Make More MoneyAutomation BuddyWe are Automation Buddies set on helping ambitious recruitment businesses who want to drive revenue using automation.READ ABOUT OUR AUTOMATION BUDDY SERVICENeed more Bullhorn / Automation Tips?Try our 1-minute tips.Be sure to sign up for (or watch the recordings of) our regular free Bullhorn and Automation webinars.CHECK OUT OUR WEBINARS
-
Downloads
Your Recruitment Training Playbook