LinkedIn, through its networking, question and answer, and application features (which I recently wrote about on OPEN) is already a powerful tool for maintaining and establishing relationships in the business world. But it can also be an enormously valuable way to attract top talent to your company, especially if you use all of the options available to you.
While posting a job to LinkedIn is similar to any other job website – adding details about the position, skills, and requirements – where the site separates itself is with company profiles, allowing you to provide potential candidates with a lot more information about your company and the people that work there. Here’s how they work and how to set one up:
1. To get started, go to the “Companies” menu on LinkedIn. From there, select “Add Company”.
2. Enter basic information about your company, like its description, number of employees, and industry it operates in.
3. Follow LinkedIn’s wizard for creating your company profile – you’ll be able to add a logo, locations, and a feed for your company blog.
Once you’ve completed LinkedIn’s steps for getting setup, your company profile will be available. Now is where it gets interesting though. In addition to showing off the basic information you provided, LinkedIn will pull in data about your company from around the site.
So, for example, all of your job listings will automatically show up on your profile, along with links to the profiles of all current employees, former employees, new hires, and recent promotions. LinkedIn also does analysis of your company and the connections that your employees have on the network. For example, it will automatically calculate your company’s median age, top schools, and other companies that they are well-connected to.
As you can imagine, all of this aggregate data about your company gives potential candidates (as well as anyone else interested in your company) a lot of information to dive into and help determine if it might be a good fit for them. And for you, once it’s setup, it all happens automatically as you and your employees use LinkedIn, though you can always make edits to your company’s basic profile information.
LinkedIn recently also added a premium product – Custom Company Profiles – that lets you add more features, like videos about your company and positions, interactive polls, and several customization options for recruiting. These are worth considering for larger companies (they come at a price), but for small businesses, a basic LinkedIn company profile should be enough to add lots of efficiency to the recruiting process – both for candidates and for you.
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