LinkedIn - recruiter’s friend or foe?

LinkedIn is a powerful platform for recruiters, both within agencies and in-house. It has an array of tools to help recruiters communicate with potential candidates, but…

• Is it wise to rely on a tool that holds so much critical candidate information in the cloud, rather than the traditional internal or ring-fenced databases?
• How can agencies and organisations mitigate against their employees moving on and taking a list of strong candidate contacts with them to a rival agency or organisation?

The simple answer is that they can’t. The days of protecting candidate databases like the crown jewels have gone. Businesses need to adapt in order to ensure that departing employees leave behind a record of the knowledge and experience they have acquired.

To ensure that knowledge is retained, it is now essential to enhance the functionality of existing internal databases and automatically track all searches and communication taking place within cloud based applications. There is no denying the power and benefits of LinkedIn – it provides a wonderful opportunity for candidates to put themselves in the shop window – but if recruiters rely on a central cloud repository, outside an agency or organisation, then there is a risk that the strength of a candidate database becomes increasingly diluted. Recruitment agencies particularly run the risk of losing any competitive edge or commercial business appeal.

In an attempt to alleviate this increasing threat, strict processes also need to be in place and rigorously enforced to ensure the full candidate history is captured and retained to reinforce database quality. The benefit of this is twofold: not only does the company retain a record should an employee move on; new employees entering the business can pick up where a predecessor has left off and understand the interactions, conversations and job opportunities that have previously occurred with a candidate.

Recruitment agencies need to be aware of the growing reliance and trend to use cloud-based tools, like LinkedIn, as a first port of call when searching for suitable candidates. Not only is it becoming close to impossible to police, but it is becoming the norm to conduct an internet based search. Data quality is ultimately what separates a recruitment agency from the competition – the ability to monitor and extend candidate information is key. Agencies need to ensure that their recruitment software has the flexibility to allow external searches to take place, but also the functionality to easily record the results back in their own internal databases.