If you are a recruiter or are responsible for hiring new employees, these are the benefits LinkedIn can bring you:
1. Identifying the right people (finding their profile)
2. Receiving introductions or referrals to potential employees (via the introductions tool or outside LinkedIn)
3. Discovering the relationships between potential employees and other contacts (see the connections in their profiles)
4. Discovering the relationships between your colleagues from the same and other departments and potential employees (see the connections in their profiles)
5. Discovering information about potential employees which makes the conversations online and offline easier (reading their profile)
6. Maintaining relationship with potential employees (Personal contacts, Discussions in Groups and answering questions in Answers)
7. Visibility for you as recruiter and for your organisation and personal branding (your profile not only on LinkedIn, but also in the Search Engines like Google, contributions in Answers and in Discussions)
8. Make yourself be perceived as an expert (contributions in Answers and in Discussions and Expert points)
9. Word of mouth publicity (receiving recommendations and people telling about you in Discussions, mention you as the expert in Answers or talking about you outside of LinkedIn)
10. Getting recommendations which are visible to potential employees (recommendations written by other people which can’t be modified by you which makes them stronger)
11. Finding the right groups and organisations to be member of, both online and offline (via the profiles of people from your network)
12. Picking up trends in the marketplace (Discussions in the groups of your peers and in the groups of people with the profile you are looking for)
13. Getting notifications when someone changes something in their profile, this is a trigger to see if a contact who didn’t qualify for a job in the past, might be a good candidate now (network updates)
14. LinkedIn has also special tools for recruiting
To your success !
Jan
PS: this is an excerpt from the book How to REALLY use LinkedIn (of in het Nederlands: Hoe LinkedIn nu ECHT gebruiken). Make sure you download your FREE light version.