Hiring managers need to optimise online profiles to attract the best talent

Online recruitment specialist, Social Media Search – a Norman Broadbent Plc company, has revealed that two-thirds of candidates review a hiring manager’s profile on LinkedIn before attending an interview.

The findings highlight the need for hiring managers to optimise their online profiles to gain a competitive advantage in the recruitment market in order to attract the best talent.

Social Media Search offers five top tips on how hiring managers can develop a LinkedIn profile that is magnetic enough to attract the candidates they want to work with:

1. Structure your profile

Make sure your profile is structured so that you can be found quickly. Fill it with key words that your target’s audience would search for to find you.

2. Strong summary

A strong summary that tells potential candidates who you are and what drives you and your company is instantly engaging.

3. Content is key

Think about what collateral you could use to demonstrate your (and your company’s) expertise. Examples could include links to videos, white papers, and thought-leadership documents.

4. Join in

The more relevant LinkedIn groups you join, the more likely it is that you’ll share groups with prospective hires.

5. Get visible

Make sure that you are easily visible. Share your content as part of your status update. This way, you can share your most useful industry insight with all of these people on a regular basis.

Jörg Bolender, Global Head of Recruitment Operations at Atos, comments, “Hiring managers play a key role in a candidate’s decision making process. In the end it’s not just about the company and the role, but also the team, the manager and the ‘human factor’. People spend more time at work than at home, so they are very interested in the opinions and insight of a potential new company or manager.”

“Social media might also be the candidate’s preferred way to communicate. As such, companies and hiring managers have to adapt to the younger generation’s expectations. Leveraging hiring managers’ networks should be top of the agenda for active sourcing as it will shortcut the search for the right candidates.”

Adam Gordon, Managing Director of Social Media Search, explains, “Utopia for organisations is getting hiring managers connected with everyone they might hire – now or in the future. Hiring managers must regularly share useful content in order to nurture those relationships so that they always have a ‘warm bench’ when they come to recruit. In the fast-paced business world of today, that advantage is immeasurable.”

“From our experience, organisations will get the best results from their initial candidate activation if the contact comes from the hiring manager. In-house recruitment teams should accept this notion as soon as possible and facilitate this process by identifying all suitable candidates, creating influential social media introduction wording and follow-up communication, and facilitating this outreach for the hiring managers.”