Transcript- An Inside Look at How Recruiters Use LinkedIn

An Inside Look at How Recruiters Use LinkedIn –…

by Angela McConnell

(Edited for length and clarity)

Intro

As Holly said, my name is Rose. I work for a tech recruitment company in Dublin, Ireland called Nine Dots and I’m also a feminist nerd.

I found it difficult to think of things that I’m into to use as an intro, but I like video games, I like technology. I've recently been getting into nail polish, which I suspect is going to drag me into a very deep rabbit hole where my finances will never recover.

The company I joined, Nine Dots, we believe strongly that openness and transparency are hugely important to recruitment. I mean they're important to everything, but recruitment suffers from a reputation of like secrecy and people don't tell you things. So that's why I'm so happy to be able to do something like this, I'll tell you anything as long as it's not violating NDAs.

Tonight, what I'd like to speak about is how recruiters use LinkedIn, because I know we all get messages, or don't get messages, usually the one that you don't want to be happening. But what's going on, on my side?

What Do Recruiters Do?

I hope that you don't think recruiters are sitting around at home all day thinking of ways to inconvenience you. But we have a job to do as well. What do recruiters do? They send you irrelevant messages, or they completely ignore your application.

Keep spamming you, we're really, really annoying. And I mean that's what you think. That's what I thought about recruitment before I joined. Legitimately, I was looking for a job. I'd been out of work for about two and a half years.

I was spamming recruiters endlessly. No one ever got back to me. So I Googled and looked up “what does a recruiter do” so I could be educated about being annoyed and point to something and go here, it says here you're supposed to help me and you're not.

And then I found out that that's not what recruiters do. I also thought that sounds fun, I could do that. Recruiters, first of all we're people too. We do, we care. I care a lot about my candidates. I get extremely emotionally invested, sometimes to my detriment. But I do have different priorities to the candidates.

My job is to find a candidate for a job. A client will come to me and say, "I'm looking for this kind of staff person. Can you find me somebody?" My job isn't to find you a job. If you come to me with your CV and I have something relevant, I'll try to help but it's not my job to go out and beat on doors for you.

And I have a lot of competing interests. I have you, the candidate who wants a job that's nice and pays well. I have the client, who wants the perfect staff member who doesn't ask for that much money. And then I have my boss saying, Rose, you've got targets for billing, you have to hit these. So, there's a lot going on.

Recruiting is really about reputation and word of mouth. It's like any service industry. You remember the really bad experiences you have, and those are the ones you talk about. So, we try to limit the bad experiences.

People rarely come home from a restaurant and saw, “Oh my god, the waiter was so awesome”. But they will definitely come home and say, “That waiter was terrible. It's just human nature. We don't rave on about the things that are good. We complain loudly about the things that are bad.

What I actually do, I find candidates for jobs, and I will take somebody through the whole process. I'll send a CV to an employer. I'll help you prep for your interview, negotiate your job offer and I'll keep in touch afterwards just to make sure your new job is going well.

I also advise both companies and people on market trends, entry structure, salaries, diversity, and inclusion. Anything that impacts your day-to-day job or a company, we'll offer advice on.

If a company hires one person a year, they may not necessarily know what's changed since last year. So it's good to keep companies updated as well.

The Recruitment Process & Timeline

Here's what the recruitment process looks like from our side. So, we're starting from the left here. We get a new role on, I qualify it. I'll talk to the client, and I'll say, cool, I have the job spec.

But there's always stuff going on that's secret on the job spec. The hiring manager has something in their head that they haven't written down, so you have to find out the vibe of the role like what's the vibe of the team?

If the team is pretty casual, open and loosey-goosey with the way they do things, the person who's heavily processed driven will hate it there. They'll lose their mind. So it's things like that you need to find out.

Then I'll source. That means I'll go out and look for people. I screen, which means I talk to people and go okay, here's the job, what do we think, are you qualified? Send CVs to the client. Then I will liaise and facilitate interviews.

As I mentioned, that involves prepping but it also involves schedule juggling and other banal things like that. Then if we get to job offer, I'll help negotiate. Negotiation, offer. Those can be in the other order because sometimes a client will come back and say, what are they looking for, that's too much?

Or they'll come back and say we're offering so much, and we’ll go back and forth a bit. The placement is somebody gets the job, woo! And then I keep in touch to make sure people are happy.

If they don't get the job, I'll still keep in touch because I'll have something else or maybe I could support them in some other way.

To give you an idea of the amount of time that recruiters are putting into things. Qualifying the role probably doesn't take that long, unless it's a brand-new client. I'll spend a little bit of time on it. I'll start researching technologies maybe I don't know or areas I'm not familiar with to make sure I understand what's going on.

Sourcing is by far the largest amount of time because you have to look at a lot of profiles and CVs to be able to find a small number of people that are good enough to message that will actually fit your job spec.

Screening, that varies because I'll probably try to spend 10 to 15 minutes at least on a phone call with everyone I sent forward. Some people just don't want to be on the phone and that's fine, we do it by email.

Sending CVs to the client doesn't take that long per CV, but I write a little bio on each person, highlighting their suitability for the job based on what I know of both of them. Interviewing, scheduling that can kind of vary in time. Sometimes it's super easy and other times you're spending three days going back and forth juggling time zones, schedules, and holidays when everyone is available at the same time.

The offer if things go well, is super quick, you just send over the job offer. They say yes and you're good to go. Sometimes there's a lot of back and forth while you try to negotiate, and they've got other offers so you have to try and say why yours is the best one and they should take it.

The same with negotiating. It's all the same amount of time because it's the same block of work for one position. But I'll have at least six to 10 positions open at any one time, each one requiring this process.

It can be more if we're really busy it can be a lot more. At one stage last year I had 24 positions open. So, you can see that recruiters, our time is pretty limited. We have a lot to do, and not a lot of time. If things are dropping through the cracks, honestly, we're trying, but, we have a lot on.

Breaking Down How Recruiters Get Paid

How do recruiters get paid? I get a base wage, it's not that high and that's by design because my wages are supposed to come from commission. So, if I get you a job, I get paid and that's my motivation.

Let's say I get you a job and your pay is 110,000 euros. The agency fee will be 15 to 20%, ideally more towards 20%. We'd only do 15% if there was going to be a lot of positions within a company, or positions that aren't that hard.

If 20% is usually where we go, then the fee is 20,000, and I get 2000 of that which is 10%. So that's what I'm getting. But I'm not going to place every position that I work on. I would get maybe one or two placements a month on average.

Sometimes you get a boomer month, and you get loads. I'm aiming to get around two to 4,000 euros extra per month in my wages and that's before tax. But it's not guaranteed.

The client sometimes just doesn't pay. Sometimes you spend months, and it goes nowhere then closes. There was a position I was working on recently and it was open for a long time. I put a lot of people in, none of them quite fit it and then the whole company went into a hiring freeze.

Sometimes you spend ages getting somebody to an offer and then the candidate says no, obviously that's their choice. But it is always devastating.

And if the candidate leaves within a couple of months, our claw back period is between three and six months. So, we have to give the fee back. It's within our interests that you get the job, but it's also within our interests that you like the job and stay there.

It’s not just financial. I do care that people really like their job but realistically if you leave within the first six months, I'm losing money.

Usually at this stage I've been paid the commission, so it gets what's called clawed back. I have to give the money back from my own wages, which sucks. You always need to have backup, you always have spare pipeline.

If you’re in the final round for a job with the company and you're thinking this is amazing, I'm getting that job. Then you see the job ad go back up again, that's not personal. They're hedging their bets, if you reject the job, they want to make sure that they've got something to go back to.

The Different Ways Recruiters Find Candidates

How do we find you? It's called recruitment, we call it sourcing. There's a couple of different kinds. There's direct sourcing which is you get those messages on LinkedIn or wherever. There's community sourcing, you go out into the community, you join groups, you make yourself known to people within your sector as a nice, approachable, sensible, sane person that people would want to talk to.

Network sourcing, that's the people I've dealt with before. You know, everyone knows what networking is. It's the network. And then job adverts, we'll put up adverts. Everyone in my company has been on copywriting courses, especially for writing job adverts and we do put a lot of work into our adverts.

How Recruiters Find Their Candidates on LinkedIn

There's a special recruiter license for LinkedIn. It's reasonably expensive but on the other hand if you make a couple of placements from it then you've got your money back and it's fine.

There's a lot of ways I can filter down and points of information I can search for. We use what's called projects to keep track of candidates. It’s a folder that I put people into, and then I can track where they are in the process and if they've replied et cetera.

The InMail that you get costs one InMail credit per message. We get 150 to 200 credits each per month, which sounds like a lot, but the industry average response rate is 21%. So out of every 100 messages I get, I can expect 21 back.

If you respond to a recruiter at all on LinkedIn with the InMail credits, they get that credit back. If you're getting messages that are just so badly targeted that you just hate the person that sent it to you, don't reply at all. Because if you click the I'm not interested button, that still gives them the InMail credit back and you don't want to give them that in their stats.

These are some of the filter options, job title, your current company, where you are, what school you went to, what kind of job you might like, what kind of skills you have, lots of details about your education, how long you've been in your current company and there's military veterans (that only works for the U.S.), what companies you've worked in, what company sizes, and what job you've had.

Basically, anything you can think of we can track by it. What languages you speak, your name (that doesn't work super well outside of the U.S. because of how international countries work), and then there's a bunch of stuff that is kind of internal.

I can search by people who've previously applied to open jobs, or I can search for people that people in my company have previously spoken to. And we search using Boolean logic, which is using "and", "or" operators.

I can say, I want to have both chips and beans, or I want to have beans or chips and we can filter down using that. You could also say I want a burger that has either cheese or bacon, but I don't want to see tomato or beetroot, or you can search for phrases or terms if you put them in inverted brackets, the same as searching on Google.

And then you can put “not”, things you don't want. The “not” operator does work on LinkedIn, but I can find it can be a little bit dodgy. These operators by the way, they work on Google and if you are looking for anything by utilizing these you will find much better search results and you escape SEO, because you're searching for something really hyper-specific.

How Long Will a Recruiter Spend on Your Profile & What They’ll Look At

Recruiters are likely to spend less than 15 seconds if they're reading your full LinkedIn profile and 15 seconds is generous. I can click through a hundred profiles in less than an hour. We really don't spend that long looking at the top of your profile before deciding if we'll scroll down.

Your LinkedIn profile isn't your CV, it doesn't matter if the same information is on both, that's fine. But you can have more fun with your LinkedIn profile, or you can exclude things if you don't want to be contacted about them.

Say you're in mining and you never want to work in pit mining again, you can just remove all of that terminology from your LinkedIn profile. When recruiters are searching for pit mining, they won't find you.

Just remove anything you don't like. If you no longer work with Java, just remove it from your LinkedIn profile. All of that stuff should be on your CV. Your CV reflects your experience accurately, but your LinkedIn can reflect what you want now, and what you want in the future.

Recruiter LIVE Demo – LinkedIn Search Fields and What They Do

NOTE: The demo is very visual, so if you'd like to watch it Live - check it out here

Live demo time, this is what I see on LinkedIn. I've made a little WIMDI folder especially for you. On the top there is projects, jobs, campaigns, reports. Projects are the folders that I keep things in.

Jobs is our job ads, campaigns is a LinkedIn functionality we don't use and reports, I can pull reports on how successful are our InMails, how many job applications are we getting. Reports, we all love reports.

Recruiter LIVE Demo – Looking for a DevOps Engineer for a Start-up (with Examples!)

We have our imaginary job that we're looking for. A DevOps engineer, if there's anyone reading this, you're going to wildly disagree with what I say, but a DevOps engineer is involved with keeping servers and things that are on the internet online.

If Twitter goes down, there is a DevOps engineer somewhere panicking. If you are having trouble logging on to Amazon, Amazon has probably hundreds of DevOps engineers in there somewhere freaking out. They use a bunch of different technologies, but they keep stuff online for you.

What I'm looking for is an individual contributor, who's looking to step into a lead role. They absolutely need to have AWS and Kubernetes. Don't worry if you don't know what they are, they're just technologies.

They need to have worked on a product that has high traffic or scale. Something like Amazon or Twitter that has high numbers of users that are constantly hammering the server, because that's a very different job to a DevOps engineer who doesn't work on a high traffic project.

It'd also be really good if they were able to code well in Python. But it's not essential if they have something else, or if they're not that good at coding, they can learn in the job. For the actual company, it's a startup, the pay is alright but it's not amazing.

Anybody who's in a super well-paid company may not be interested. And they need to be within two hours’ time difference of Ireland, that's quite a common one for remote jobs in Ireland. You can have things that are remote within Europe, but they want people in vaguely the same time zone. So that takes us out about as far east as maybe Ukraine.

In the job titles field, I've put in principal and then I've put in misspelled "principle" because not everybody speaks perfect English. That's a very common spelling mistake and I'm not going to reject somebody because of a slight grammatical error. I've put in lead and think what I'm going to add in as well.

I'm going to exclude anyone who's sort of at too high a level, because with sourcing, you make a number of passes, you start off with kind of the ideal best fit ever and then you broaden it out if you're not finding what you want. So at the moment I don't want to look at people who are already managers because I'm making the assumption that they wouldn't want to step down.

And because this job is hands-on, a lot of managers are no longer hands-on. They're doing strategic-managery things, and nobody wants to go back to coding if they haven't been doing it for a while.

I've put in Europe, and you can exclude countries, I've just excluded Ireland again to protect the privacy of our candidates. With this you can also have, open to relocate. So if I was looking for somebody to relocate, I can hit that and it's going to get me people who have entered themselves on LinkedIn that they're interested in relocating to an area. But right now, I need somebody who's physically within that country.

Using Boolean search terms, I've put in DevOps, since if you're in any kind of a DevOps job, you will have that word on your profile. I've put in Kubernetes, and I've put in K8s. That's just shorthand within the industry for Kubernetes, AWS, and then I've put in a few words like load-balancing or scale. Also, I've put in payments or e-commerce, because those are industries that are likely to have the type of person that I want.

There's another product we use called LinkedIn Insights that we can pull talent reports on companies. I could type in Kubernetes and AWS, and it'll give me a list of companies that use those technologies. We often use that as part of our sourcing.

Then we have years of experience. Years of experience can be difficult because you could have somebody with 10 years’ experience that's rubbish, and you could have somebody with five years’ experience that's amazing.

Realistically, I think if you were going to be stepping into a lead position and you have less than five years’ experience, it's going to suck for you. We'll just keep that field at five years.

I can also search for how long they've been in their current company. That can be quite handy if you're working with visa restrictions, because every country has their own thing going on with work permits.

For example, in Ireland after two years working somewhere you can get a work permit that allows you to work for anyone. For this field, I'd put in two years there, and that'll get me people who are just ready to move on to another company after getting their free work permit.

I can add in company types, if I was looking for somebody from educational institution or somebody from nonprofit, I can do that. And in this instance what I'm going to do is add in company size, because I think if you're coming from a really big company, you're going to struggle in a startup because it's such a different vibe.

Let's also pretend for the sake of argument, this company that I've spoken to, they've said they don't want to see somebody from giant companies because they've struggled with that before.

I’ve clicked away from “hide previously viewed” just so that I can see some brand new fresh candidates. Now, we'll go to search.

On the top we have some spotlights. I can look at people who have actively set their profile to “open to work”, so they've said, "Hello, I want a job". If you're looking for attention from recruiters, that's your first step because we always, number one, go to the people who are open to work, it's a no-brainer. They've said they're looking for a job. I mean that's just awesome.

Active talent, I don't personally think posting a lot is super helpful. It's very industry dependent, and it's certainly no harm to put posts but you don't need to. But if you're logging in, you've updated your profile, you're answering Inmails, or you're doing active things on LinkedIn, you'll appear in this active talent pool. They're not necessarily open to work, but they might be on LinkedIn a lot.

They've also just added “work at companies that may be experiencing layoffs”, which is weird but interesting. Good for us, just weird. If your company's experiencing layoffs, you'll appear on this part of it even if you are not personally affected.

Then on the right-hand side of the screen, you've got “has company connections”. That means they're connected to somebody within my company. So maybe I could say to my colleague, “Oh I see you're connected to so-and-so, do you know them? Do you know anything about them, do they want to talk to me?”

Connected to talent brand means that they're following our page, or they've liked one of our updates. Applicants is pretty self-explanatory. And then there's internal applicants, which as a recruitment company wouldn't affect us. But if you're working in a massive company and you've got people intercompany transferring, it'll become relevant there.

Let's say we're just looking at people open to work. I've got 53 LinkedIn profiles appearing in my search which isn't bad for the like level of specificity I'm looking for, so we'll have a look.

The first profile, AWS and DevOps evangelist. Yeah, I'm interested in scrolling down. So your job title, there's a lot of differing information and advice online. I think if you just say what you're doing, I'm interested in scrolling down because it says DevOps and AWS and it came up in my search.

But you must also have a lot of the other skills I'm looking for. You see some people that have, “I help people to become their best selves” or something like that on their title. I don't really like that because it doesn't tell me what they're doing.

Scrolling down a bit on this profile, they've been in their current company for just over a year. They were in AWS before that, Amazon hires good people so that stands to them. I'd be interested in people who’ve worked for Amazon. However, they were in South Africa, and originally they're from India so I'd worry about their work permissions.

I don't know anything about work permissions in the Netherlands, so give them the benefit of the doubt. I can look at what their current company EclecticIQ does. They're doing, ooh, defense technology, 126 employees.

I can have a look at the other EclecticIQ employees as well, so I can see what their funding and stuff is like. We'll say we're cautiously interested in him.

He doesn't have a lot of information there, so I don't know what he's been doing in EclecticIQ. But because it's a defense company, they probably don't allow their employees to put a lot of information online. We'll give him the benefit of the doubt, and I'll save him to my pipeline.

From my pipeline, I can message somebody directly. I can go “Hello. Blah blah blah”. I have templates that I use, and I tend to expand for each role a middle blurb with, “here's the skills you'll require, here's the salary, here's some other information” and then I'll personalize it as I go along. Something like, I can't really tell what you're doing in your current company but your previous experience interests me. Here's the job, blah blah.

And then I can change the stage of where I am with a candidate. So I can say I've contacted them, it automatically moves to replied when they reply. If they're not interested, then I can add it to the notes field, why they're not interested, or I can say I've sent them a job spec.

Here, this profile, is in the UK so this is actually decent. You can see that they've been in a senior position in their current company, and you can see that they have implemented changes.

They've kind of done things that you'd expect a lead to do, in that they've initiated changes. Often a startup likes to see that, if they're hiring somebody at this level, in a way they need somebody to come in and tell them what to do. To bring their knowledge and say I'm really experienced, here's my advice.

My only worry would be that they're working in a blockchain company, and blockchain companies tend to pay really well. I may not be able to afford him. And tech salaries in the UK can be very high. But he's not in London so I'll give him a go. If he was in London, I wouldn't message him because his salary's probably really high.

This guy is also on a contract so they're no good to me. We don't want contractors, we want somebody who's looking for a permanent job. This profile looks good, they're leading a team. But you can see here they've said interested in 100% remote work, B2B contracts. B2B means they're looking for business to business. It means they don't want to be involved with a recruitment agency, so we'll move on.

I'm not going to drag you through 53 profiles, but broadly what I look for is, information on the profile that matches what I'm looking for in my job spec.

If you’re finding that you're getting messages that are targeted against the kind of jobs that you want, have a look at your profile and if you're talking a lot about the things you don't want to do. This is your LinkedIn profile. You can just delete it, and only have the things that you want to do.

In a lot of ways, you're never ever going to stop recruiters from sending you mistargeted messages. A lot of recruiters will message 25 people at once, they'll do that for 200 people and they figure if five people get back that are reasonable, sourcing done.

You can see how it's tempting, especially if you've got a lot of work on, you don't have a lot of time. You've got a manager and a client breathing down your neck. You're just going to go, argh, and some people are just super lazy. But we'll give people the benefit of the doubt.

Every recruiter has done this, none of us are innocent. I try not to, but sometimes I just don't have the time and I panic. My advice there is talking more about if you're getting recruiters and you don't want them.

How to Target Recruiters When You’re Actively Looking for a Job

But what if you're not getting recruiters and you do want them. To avoid everybody's privacy, I'll just go to my own profile to talk about this. It's not uncommon that I will get messages from recruiters offering me a job in DevOps because my profile will come up when they search for DevOps.

That's a problem that I've decided to deal with, for having those words on my profile because my urge to have people look at my profile and decide they want to contact me for recruitment things, is higher than my desire not to receive messages from recruiters offering me jobs in DevOps.

If you're not getting messages, start looking through job specs for jobs that you're interested in, and add those keywords to your profile if you have those technologies or skills.

If you don't have them, don't add them. You'll just annoy people. You'll start getting messages for jobs you're interested in, but not qualified for, which is very upsetting for you because you'll have to start saying that to people. And that's not good for your self-confidence.

When you're looking at your own job, if there's any kind of buzz or key words, just start jotting them down and then you can incorporate them into your profile. Your LinkedIn profile is an expression of what you want to be doing.

My LinkedIn profile is an expression of my desire to recruit DevOps people. I want people to read my profile and say, I want to talk to Rose about a lovely job in DevOps, or I want to talk to Rose about hiring lovely staff in DevOps.

Also, get other people to read over your profile and see what they pick up, because it's so hard to write down what you actually do. I'm sure everyone who's written their CV has opened up a page and gone, "oh no, what do I actually do with my life? What have I ever done?"

As you go through your career, write down fun projects that you've worked on, or things that you liked doing, in a document somewhere. When it comes time to update your LinkedIn and your CV, you can add that information in.

When you do get messages from recruiters, observe what they're messaging you about and then you know what’s working.

And if there are recruiters within your industry, ask them. Just say, “Look, what can I do to improve my profile?” Because they'll be working directly in your industry, in your sector and they'll be able to offer really targeted advice.

What I’ve given is very vague advice, write down keywords for things you want to do, that's not that specific. You might be sitting there thinking, “Rose, I actually don't know what keywords to write”.

This is just a whistle stop tour, recruiters, we're really not trying to make your life harder. We're not deliberately going out to ignore you. If you're sending out job applications and you're not getting a response, look at the number of applicants that have gone in for that job.

If there's a couple of hundred of them, and it takes about one minute to review an application, recruiters may not have time to go through them all. It sucks, but that's just how it is.

You'll get a much better response if you directly email the recruiter or contact them directly on LinkedIn because then you're putting yourself out there a little bit. And recruiters are always happy to talk to people. We're always happy to talk to candidates.

A good recruiter is always happy to talk to you even if you're not directly placeable at that moment. Because one day you will be, or they might get a role in tomorrow you're ideal for. It's good to maintain friendly contact with the good recruiters and if you find a good one, hold on to them because wow.

Thanks so much for listening to all of that. I hope I wasn't going too fast or too confusing. And if you ever want to ask me about recruitment things, you can contact me on rose@ninedots.io or you can go to our website ninedots.io

We recruit internationally, so if you're looking for staff, and you are globally anywhere, let me know. We've worked on all continents except Antarctica, particularly interested in getting Antarctica on the map. If you've any questions after this or if you want me to look over your CV, I'm happy to do so.