Using LinkedIn to Stay Relevant to Recruiters

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In my last blog post, “The Latest LinkedIn Change—Have You Kept Up?, I shared a bit of the behind-the-scenes view on how recruiters are using LinkedIn as a tool for tracking and communicating to potential candidates. In this post, I’ll focus on how you can manage your profile to improve your likelihood of being seen and contacted by recruiters.

Note: For the purposes of this blog post, the term “recruiter” applies to both internal corporate recruiters as well as search firm recruiters.

The most important thing you should do in your profile is ensure you have selected the appropriate industry not discipline that you have your experience in. Ninety percent of hiring managers require their recruiters to find candidates from their industry. If you are a marketer in financial service, your industry should be financial services and your discipline should be marketing. Far too many people reverse these two and make this mistake on LinkedIn.

There are two reasons this is important:

1. If a financial services company is looking to fill a marketing role, the recruiter is going to start the search filtering by industry, in this case Financial Services. There are a multitude of cascading filters the recruiter will use, and industry is the very first one. If your profile lists your industry as Marketing, you probably eliminated yourself from the recruiter’s search, or, in the best case, you are one of the least relevant profiles that will appear at the end of their search results.


2. LinkedIn is continuously working to ensure they serve up relevant information to you as a member. Their Number One priority is getting the jobs recruiters pay for in front of the right audience (so we keep buying their job posts). When a recruiter posts a job, as in the same example as above, they categorize the posting by industry, Financial Services. If your profile lists your industry as Marketing and not Financial Services, LinkedIn isn’t going to serve up that job for you to view.

It’s tempting to choose your expertise over your industry. One of the common arguments I hears is that “marketers can market anything.” While this may be true to the marketer, recruiters are tasked with finding like industry experience, the exact match. This holds true across every industry. It is very rare when a hiring manager asks for the most talented marketer and is agnostic to the industry.

Follow this one simple rule and don’t miss out on being found.

Source: B2C