Kurt Rakos of SkyWater Search
, an Executive Recruiter friend of mine and a founding partner of this largest recruiting firm in the upper midwestern US, recently caught me up on how recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates.
First, an illustration: Kurt told me he was doing a search for a specific open position they had. The search turned up 500 candidates, simply too many to go through manually in any quick way. So he asked his assistant to "just give me those who’ve indicated they are open to talking to recruiters".
There were 75. So that’s the "database" Kurt worked with, not all 500. His competition does the same thing, he told me.
In short, those candidates, by alerting recruiters on LinkedIn that they were willing to be contacted, self-selected themselves IN to Kurt’s search.
So be sure you’ve turned ON the settings that alert recruiters that you’re looking.
SkyWater is a firm of about 30 recruiters and they pay a lot to LinkedIn because it works for them. Many recruiting firms no longer fully maintain an internal database of resumes because it takes longer to search it than it does to search profiles on LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s powerful search tools are critical to recruiters today.
Email won’t help you much. In today’s speeded-up searches, minutes count for recruiters competing for great candidates. So emailing your resume today to a recruiter
when there’s no opening
they are eager to fill, is often an empty exercise. As Kurt says to my clients and groups, “If you’ve done a good job on LinkedIn, we’ll find you
there
”.
Thank you, Kurt! SkyWater Search can be found
here
.
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