Dive Brief:

• Zane Bacic, Marketing Specialist with cloud-CRM firm, Bullhorn, reveals the 4 biggest mistakes that recruiters make on LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network. He says that this is costing recruiters much in terms of damaged relationships and lost opportunities that the social network offers.

• Some of the mistakes that recruiters make on LinkedIn include: focusing too much on quantity of connections vs. quality, sending out canned impersonal messages to LinkedIn users to save time, not interacting in real-time with connections by keeping conversations relevant to their interests, and forgetting to ask others for their written recommendations as a form of social proof of recruitment abilities. 

• There are currently 433 million users on LinkedIn, a golden opportunity for recruiters at any level of their career to strategically connect with candidates and clients.

Dive Insight:

Bacic offers some great tips for getting more out of LinkedIn, in general, but these tips can apply to everyone, not just recruiters. For example, he mentions evaluating potential connections for their relevancy to business objectives before sending a connection request. Many are guilty of playing the numbers game, and it can be tempting to simply hit that connect button without thinking whether the person can support our goals or not.

The overall point of the tips provided by Bacic is to make the experience more personal and focused on recruitment efforts. By leveraging the connections to be made on LinkedIn, and taking extra steps to show genuine interest in others, anyone can tap into this social network for recruitment and business building purposes. It’s about making networking more human.