With over 186 million registered users across 170 industries and 200 countries, LinkedIn has quickly cemented itself as a must-have resource for businesses looking to hire.
Connecting professionals based on their experience, skills, interests and knowledge, LinkedIn is one of the most resourceful tools on the web when it comes to building your company brand and professional network.
With a little bit of time and effort, here are some of the ways you can use LinkedIn to build your company’s brand to attract and identify talent for your team:
1. Create a strong profile. Your company’s LinkedIn profile is the most important element of the site. Think of it as an enhancement to your business card – a quick and simple way for people to decide if you’re relevant to their needs.
Use an impressive headline summarising your company and include as many skills and relevant keywords. That way, your profile will show up in search results when potential candidates are looking.
2. Ask for recommendations. An easy way to enhance your reputation is to obtain as many recommendations from existing employees and clients as possible. Lots of recommendations are social evidence that you can be relied upon.
3. Leverage the SEO benefits. Touching on this briefly in point one, keywords are paramount if you want to be found, particularly on search engines like Google and Bing.
Take the time to optimise your organisations summary. Include links to your careers site and any other pages on your company website that you want to highlight. Perhaps you have a blog or a ‘meet the team’ page?
4. Join Groups. Joining groups is a great way to build your brand on LinkedIn. Make sure you join those specific to your industry – this will not only increase your indirect connections, but it will also attract potential candidates who you could recruit.
Participate in discussions, and submit posts and comments to various groups to broaden your reach and position yourself as a thought leader.
5. Create your own group. If you’re willing to commit the time to creating and nurturing your own company group, it can pay huge dividends when it comes to recruitment.
The best thing about it is the email broadcast tool included with it. Under the ‘Manage’ options, you will see a feature to ‘Send an Announcement’. Although it’s restricted to one announcement every seven days, it’s a free and easy way to broadcast content to your group members, and ultimately, your talent pool.
6. Update your email signature. To build awareness of your company’s LinkedIn profile, get your employees to hyperlink their email signature to your LinkedIn page. Since many professionals rely on email as their primary communication tool, your email signature is often a great starting point for connecting with others.
7. Produce a steady stream of updates. When you log in to LinkedIn, it presents a list of network updates.
Start building yourselves as an employer of choice through an ever-present stream of relevant information that appears directly on the homepage of your connections (and potential candidates).
8. Offer responses to LinkedIn Answers. Most people are not aware of the LinkedIn Answers function, but it opens up another opportunity to gain insight and perspective from potential candidates.
Likewise, if you become a frequent contributor to other questions, it’s a great way to establish yourself as a subject matter expert and help you build your brand.
These are just a few of the ways LinkedIn can help you to build your brand to attract talent. Whilst it might seem time consuming, spending just five minutes a day on building and developing your presence can do wonders for your company.
In fact, those five minutes can transform your online reputation, and ultimately, help you attract the next star performer for your business.
