Why Recruiters use LinkedIn & what the Competition is doing

Why LinkedIn Is Every Recruiter’s Hot Search Tool

Jan. 18 2011 - 5:01 pm | 7,520 views | 0 recommendations | 12 comments

By ELAINE WONG

LinkedIn, a social networking site for professionals, has emerged as the hot tool of choice for resume inundated recruiters. 

That’s because traditional job search sites like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com, while affording human resources personnel reach and scope, also attract applications from a lot of “unqualified candidates,” writes Joe Light in The Wall Street Journal’s “Careers” section today. And, in a day and age when recruiters are more than likely to get slammed with inquiries from tons of eager and super-hungry job seekers, whittling it down to those who are the most likely prospects can be a challenge.

To narrow it down to only the most promising leads, some recruiters are pre-selecting and headhunting candidates in advance, per the WSJ. The trend has also given rise to a new crop of recruiters who aren’t just hired to sift through paperwork. Instead, they’re more like executive search recruiters, folks who are carefully trained to identify and poach the highest levels and best matches of talent.

Given the shift in recruiters’ candidate-hunting preferences, should job search sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com, Indeed.com, SimplyHired.com and the like be scared? Yes and no. On the one hand, these types of filtered searches are more likely to occur when a recruiter is seeking highly specialized talent. On the other hand, job search sites do need to adapt.

Monster.com, for one, has plans to do just that. As the WSJ’s Light notes:

“In the coming months, Monster Worldwide Inc. plans to roll out technology that ranks candidates based on how well their applications fit requirements set by the recruiter, says chief global marketing officer Ted Gilvar. The product has been available to some customers since late last year. 

Media Geek also put in a call to Monster rival CareerBuilder, but hasn’t heard back. In the meantime, though LinkedIn may be fast emerging as the  search engine of choice among recruiters, that hasn’t stopped companies like CareerBuilder from charging ahead and plunking down big bucks in next month’s Super Bowl game.

As first reported by The New York Times last week, the latter is bringing its popular chimpanzees back into this year’s game. Monster, which has yet to announce its plans, has said that the ROI reaped from past games was well worth it. The company’s global chief marketing officer, Ted Gilver, told The Boston Globe last year that:” 

“We’re back in the Super Bowl because it works…We reach 100 million people with our message of innovation at the one major event where they’re paying as much attention to the commercials as they are the event itself.” 

Whatever the case, Monster and CareerBuilder shouldn’t be too concerned. By all means, modify your search engines to better adapt to today’s “do more with less” and “do things more efficiently” mentality, but remember this: Job applications may be plentiful now that Americans are looking for work, but once good times bounce back and workers are more settled and happy with their new posts, recruiters might have to dig deeper for resumes. LinkedIn offers a targeted, easy to home in approach, but Monster and CareerBuilder still offer scale and reach. 

Of course, it’ll likely be some time before recruiters see their inboxes less cluttered.
Update: Media Geek just heard back from CareerBuilder. Turns out the job search site, like Monster, had previously taken steps to better cater to recruiters’ selective screening habits. In 2004, the site rolled out a job recommendation engine, “which automatically suggests job listings to job seekers on CareerBuilder.com based on their resumes and search behavior,” writes CMO Richard Castellini. (The latter accounts for 50 percent of the applications employers using CareerBuilder receive.) ”What this tells us is that the recommendation technology is highly accurate in appealing to job seeker’s interests and skill sets because they are acting on those recommendations and applying to jobs.  This same technology is also applied to resume database searches,” he says.
Asked whether LinkedIn could indeed rise to become a dominant threat, Castellini points out that employers have come back with “bigger [ad] packages” this year. ” “One of the areas where we’re seeing strong growth is in our Source/Screen solution, where we advertise positions and provide a select number of pre-qualified, interested candidates to employers,” he writes.