Our HR team descended on Las Vegas for LinkedIn’s annual Talent Connect Conference to learn more about how we can leverage current trends in digital recruitment and the LinkedIn product itself to amp up our own recruitment game.
Common trends throughout the conference were focused on topics related to our Millennial workforce, branding your company, the candidate experience, recruitment practices and of course, the LinkedIn product itself. We brought home a number of takeaways, but here are some highlights:
- Millennials: Between the ages of 13-33, millennials will soon fill 80% of our workforce. They’re motivated by responsibility, flexibility, opportunities to grow and a sense of community. When searching for talent, strategies like engaging them with interview feedback; providing transparency around salary; and creating an overview of the salary path an individual can embark on can help set your company apart from the outset.
- Company Branding: Building a communications strategy that reflects your company’s mission and values will get your company noticed – and help build more of a community with current employees. Focus on engaging and increasing your followers by maximizing your communications using social media. All it really takes with a plan is a smartphone and the Internet. Check out our new company-wide Instagram handle, for example.
- Candidate Experience: What type of experiences are you providing your candidates from the first time they view your website to meeting with your hiring manager? Just as Apple uses advertisements to speak to their beliefs rather than their products’ features, you should be reaching out to candidates with branding that focuses on creating an emotional investment. Check out the work of Rapid7 on LinkedIn, where a fun and creative standard of candidate experience was implemented.
- Recruitment Practices: For those in recruitment, it is incredibly important to ensure there’s a strategy in place for each role. Asking questions like “who is reaching out to candidates, qualifying resumes, closing the deal”, and “how many interviews do you need to make a final offer” are critical in achieving a smooth recruitment process. Having a strategy per role will increase your efficiencies in terms of communication and possibly quicken your timeline to fill. Other important aspects when building a strategy using pipeline analytics, setting aside time for strategic resourcing, knowing your competition, investing in yourself as a Recruiter and engaging your assets (relationships, followers, employers, hiring managers).
- LinkedIn Product: LinkedIn used the conference to introduce a number of long-awaited upgrades to its product including an awesome new Recruiter mobile app. But as a Talent Recruiter myself, one of the greatest takeaways came from Glen Cathey who focused on top search techniques using LinkedIn’s Recruiter tools. He recommends after casting a wide net with your initial search – including all words from your job stack – look for other words people use to describe their roles and expertise, narrow down or revise your search, and iterate as necessary. Oftentimes candidates use other words to describe their roles because they don’t want to be found, but our job as recruiters is to find them. And Glen showed us just how to uncover all those hidden gem candidates using Linkedin.
Linkedin’s Talent Connect 2013 rose to the occasion in order to Connect, Inspire and Transform, which is exactly what they have achieved. It comes highly recommended to save the date for Talent Connect 2014: San Francisco, Moscone Center West, October 20-22.
