LinkedIn Tips
by Bill Vick
I recently received an email from Bill Vick, industry icon, LinkedIn expert, and all-around nice guy who wanted to share some information with me about LinkedIn, a great service I have written about in this column before.
Bill tells me he has had discussions with recruiters all over the country about their successes and the many ways LinkedIn has benefited the industry. During those discussions many questions were asked, and Bill has put together a few LinkedIn tips that he has agreed to share with The Fordyce Letter subscribers. Follow these tips to enhance your LinkedIn experience.
1. It’s often more important to be found than to find. It’s also very important that, when you are found on LinkedIn, your LinkedIn Profile page is up-to-date. So take the time to make sure your profile is complete, is regularly updated, and reflects who you are and what you are currently doing. And don’t forget to sprinkle your profile with the keywords that somebody looking for you might use when search-ing for you.
2. Remember, you are your brand. Google your own name, strive for consistency in your online image, and try to have the same message whether some-body finds you on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, or any of the other networking sites. By the way, if you don’t find yourself on Google, or your name is not as prominent (i.e., front page of Google) as you would like, it could be time to think about promoting yourself better online.
3. Gain visibility and branding by participating in the new LinkedIn Answers. You can ask questions of your own network, or the entire LinkedIn network, as well as offering answers where your special knowledge and information will help others – and in the process add to your visibility. It’s not only good karma to help but also gives you the stamp of expertise and special knowledge. It’s essential to be genuine in framing the question. If you try and game the system by framing a blatant self-promotion as if it were a genuine question, you won’t have to wait long for someone in the network to flag your “question” as spam. But genuine, interesting questions are bringing people great positive exposure.
4. Connect with power networkers or “hubs” in your industry, company, or job function. You can be confident that the ones near the top of any search when sorted by connections are in the thousands, and their second degree is hundreds of thousands, which now becomes part of your third-degree network.
5. Install the Outlook toolbar and consider joining Plaxo (www.plaxo.com). The new Plaxo 3.0 not only works with PCs and Macs but also offers automatic synchronization with your address book of choice, various Web mail systems, and now LinkedIn.
Thanks to Bill for sharing. You can find out more about his very popular book, Happy About LinkedIn for Recruiting, at http://www.happyabout.info/LinkedIn4recruiting.php or his newest book about recruiting superstars at http://www.bigbiller.org.
Maureen Sharib
– Telephone Names Sourcer
“What’s a names sourcer?” you may be thinking. You might have seen that title recently, or maybe seen industry recruitment ads calling for the skill. Names sourcing is a little-understood activity. Simply put, it’s the finding of people who hold specific titles (usually) within specific organizations (usually) so that you, as a recruiter, can contact them and offer them your opportunity. Those of us who have “been around the block” might know this technique as “ruse calling,” something we all learned way back when in our first week on the job. Maureen is a names sourcer – more specifically, a telephone names sourcer – and she has taken this (almost) lost art, revamped the process to remove the “ruse” part of the job, and is now helping recruiters all over the country safely fill their open assignments. I wanted to give everyone a heads-up in case the need for this type of service might arise.
Maureen says usually 30 to 50 names should pretty much guarantee one immediate hire in most industries. “It’s a numbers game,” she reminds us. “Though in the month of June one of my customers wrote, ‘Your research into (giant manufacturing organization) produced two good candidates for the upper-level procurement position. All 12 names were usable. The client is impressed, and we are good to go.’ It happens, but it’s not the rule.” As a telephone names sourcer, she might use the Internet to do some initial research into a company to find a few names, but once she has those, she gets on the phone. “This is Maureen Sharib. Can you please tell me if Julia Matthews is still the organizational development director in your HR group? Oh, you don’t know? Can you please transfer me to the administrative assistant for that department?” Once Maureen gets in, she’s IN, and she’s famous for her retellings of the happy (and sometimes not) events.
One of Maureen’s typical jobs (she charges $42 per name, although the industry average seems to be in the $55 per name range) can save her customers, on average, 75% to 80% of typical recruiting costs.
Maureen not only provides the sourcing service described but also offers a course on telephone names sourcing to her recruitment industry students called The Magic in the Method. You can find out more information on Maureen, her services, and her training on her website at www.techtrak.com. You can also contact Maureen via email at maureen@techtrak.com or via telephone at (513) 899-9628.
Telecom Jobs
WirelessMobile-Jobsboard.com
I recently received an email announcing a recruitment hub for those seeking telecoms jobs, radio jobs, mobile computing jobs, Bluetooth jobs, WiMAX jobs, Wi-Fi jobs, and mobile telecoms jobs – WirelessMobile-Jobsboard.com. I know there are many recruiters in this specialty, so I thought I would include this site for those firms.
They advertise telecoms and mobile telecoms jobs for those seeking jobs in management, marketing, business development, sales, project management, business analysts, engineering, soft-ware, software development, software applications, and jobs in wireless technologies, networks, and regulatory and support functions.
I don’t know much about this service other than what is on the website, but anyone with a need in this area can find out more by visiting their website at www. wirelessmobile-jobs board.com.
Tip
Melissa Data
This is a site that offers many free lookups that we can all use in our daily recruiting and/or sourcing duties. They offer lookups for zip codes (by county and city), telephone numbers, addresses, IP location, SIC codes (including counts of businesses based on type or SIC code by state), radius searches (including zip and area codes), and much more. They do have some fee-based services of course, but most of the lookups are free of charge. I often use them to look up zip codes when trying to source candidates in a specific geographic area. Visit the Lookup page of this site by going to http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/index.htm.
Mark E. Berger, CPC, AIRS CIR, has been in recruiting since 1979. He is currently a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and has been there and at its predecessor, M.E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and is an expert on recruiting and sourcing products, services available on the Internet, and how these products add to the bottom line. Mark’s interests include successfully integrating both computer and Internet recruiting technology into a traditional recruiting environment. He has taken AIRS I and II training and has obtained the AIRS CIR designation. Mark is also on
the board of directors for the Missouri Association of Personnel Services. He can be reached at mark@ramseyfox.com. His web-site is www.swatrecruiting. com, and we recommend that you visit it to see archives of his articles and information offerings exclusively for recruiters.