Unlocking LinkedIn by Katharine Robinson - Discover Sourcing Workshop Handout 2013

At Sourcing Hat, we think businesses
should strive to hire people that love
what they do – people that share values
and fit in with company culture. We
encourage this by helping you reach, talk
to, and meet more interesting and
interested people.
Unlocking
LinkedIn
Katharine Robinson
@TheSourceress
www.sourcinghat.co.uk
UKSourcers
@UKSourcers
www.uksourcers.co.uk
Discover Sourcing Workshop
With Katharine Robinson, Sourcing Hat

Sourcing Hat Ltd. T: +44 (0) 7779 716 147
http://sourcinghat.co.uk katharine@sourceress.co.uk
Profile Optimisation
A Professional Photo
People are much more likely to interact on LinkedIn with those that have a profile picture.
People want like to see the people they are connecting with.
LinkedIn say that having a picture increases your engagement by 45%.
Bear in mind that using an image that is not your likeness or a head-shot photo is against
LinkedIn’s User Agreement.
Customising your headline
Your LinkedIn headline is there to communicate what you do. It is displayed beneath your name
in search results so is very important for selling yourself and encouraging people to click on your
profile.
By default your LinkedIn headline is your current job title and company, but it doesn’t have to
be. It should tell job seekers whether or not they should click on your profile. Is “Rearcher at
Travis Research” going to help them make that choice? Would “FMCG Recruiter, hiring Product
Managers in London” be a better headline?
You have 120 characters to play with for your LinkedIn profile, so make the most of them. Using
relevant industry keywords will also help your profile’s search ranking.
You do not have to change your job title to change your headline.
Full Work History
Having a full work history not only makes you look credible, but helps people relate to you
better. Even if you think one of your first jobs isn’t currently relevant, it might be just the thing
you have in common with a great candidate.
Your previous roles are also a great place to include keywords that are still relevant to you. The
more separate fields that contain a particular keyword, the better your profile will rank for that
word. So if you’ve had a few roles in recruitment, then be sure not to leave those job description
fields blank.

Recommendations
Whether or not recommendations add to your credibility is open to debate. One thing that is not
though, is that people with more recommendations rank better in LinkedIn search than those
that do not.
Having 3 recommendations used to be necessary to get a 100% complete profile. It is not
necessary anymore but 3 still seems to be a good number to aim for as it is more than the
majority of LinkedIn users.
Public Profile URL
This is the web address of your public LinkedIn profile. It will be in the format
http://linkedin.com/in/your_chosen_text
By customising this to be just your name, it makes the URL look cleaner and more professional
and helps to Search Engine Optimise your profile for your name. People that you call on the
phone will likely Google you as soon as they get off the phone – it helps a lot if they can find you
easily.
Links
You can add up to three links to your LinkedIn profile in the Additional Information section
Here are some ideas for what you could link to:
• You company’s website
• Jobs on your website
• A LinkedIn Company Page
• A LinkedIn Group that you manage
• Your own personal webpage, blog or profiles on other sites like Xing or Viadeo

You should also customise the text of the links. “Company Website” doesn’t tell someone
viewing your profile anything. Something descriptive like “The ERA” will make people much more
likely to click as they know where they will end up.
This also is also good Search Engine Optimisation your other pages/sites – Google will see a link
from LinkedIn (a reputable and popular website) with relevant keywords in the anchor text.
To customise the text of the link, select “Other” from the drop down menu rather than
“Company Website” or “My Blog”.
Keyword rich summary
You have 2,000 characters here to make your profile your own. This allows you to let people
know what makes you tick as a professional. It is also another great opportunity to think about
what keywords you’d like your profile to be found for. By not filling in your summary you are
missing out on a great way to attract the right people to contact you and to improve your
ranking in LinkedIn search results.
Maximising Groups
You can be a member of up to 50 groups. It is a good idea to maximise this as sharing a group
with someone gives them the ability to contact you via LinkedIn. So look for groups that are
relevant to the skills you are looking for and the industries you are hiring in. The groups that
come up top in search results will be those that have the most members – they will expand your
network the most. It’s also a good idea to join smaller more targeted groups too.

Status Updates
Regular LinkedIn status updates greatly increase the number of views of your profile. Update
your status every day for a week and see how the graph of your “Profile Views” changes.
You probably only update your status when you post a new job on LinkedIn – remember to say
something more creative with your job than “I’m Hiring!”. You could also tell your connections
about
• Company News
• Blogs posts from your personal blog, company blog or from others
• If you are attending an event
• What skills you are looking for today?
• If you’ve had any training
• Your charity fundraising activities (like Movember)
Adding rich content
You can add two items of rich content for each job on your profile and two in your summary.
This might include documents (reports, white papers etc.), presentations, videos or pictures.
Growing Your Network to 500+ Connections
The number of connections someone has is often a way of assessing how active they are on
LinkedIn and how long they have been using it. Most recruiters that have been in the business a
couple of years will have amassed at least 500 connections.
A large network in a relevant industry can also help you gain access to more people in your
LinkedIn searches.

X-Ray Searching LinkedIn
You can use the site: operator to search for pages on LinkedIn via a Search Engine. This can be a
handy way of accessing more profiles.
You may notice that your LinkedIn profile is hosted on the country specific subdomain
uk.linkedin.com. Profiles from other countries use the same convention.
Here’s a list of other country subdomains identified on LinkedIn
Country URL Country URL
Afghanistan af.linkedin.com Albania al.linkedin.com
Algeria dz.linkedin.com Argentina ar.linkedin.com
Australia au.linkedin.com Austria at.linkedin.com
Bahrain bh.linkedin.com Bangladesh bd.linkedin.com
Belgium be.linkedin.com Bolivia bo.linkedin.com
Bosnia and Herzegovina ba.linkedin.com Brazil br.linkedin.com
Bulgaria bg.linkedin.com Canada ca.linkedin.com
Chile cl.linkedin.com China cn.linkedin.com
Colombia co.linkedin.com Costa Rica cr.linkedin.com
Croatia hr.linkedin.com Cyprus cy.linkedin.com
Czech Republic cz.linkedin.com Denmark dk.linkedin.com
Dominican Republic do.linkedin.com Ecuador ec.linkedin.com
Egypt eg.linkedin.com El Salvador sv.linkedin.com
Estonia ee.linkedin.com Finland fi.linkedin.com
France fr.linkedin.com Germany de.linkedin.com
Ghana gh.linkedin.com Greece gr.linkedin.com
Guatemala gt.linkedin.com Hong Kong hk.linkedin.com
Hungary hu.linkedin.com Iceland is.linkedin.com
India in.linkedin.com Indonesia id.linkedin.com
Iran ir.linkedin.com Ireland ie.linkedin.com
Israel il.linkedin.com Italy it.linkedin.com
Jamaica jm.linkedin.com Japan jp.linkedin.com
Jordan jo.linkedin.com Kazakhstan kz.linkedin.com
Kenya ke.linkedin.com Korea kr.linkedin.com
Kuwait kw.linkedin.com Latvia lv.linkedin.com
Lebanon lb.linkedin.com Lithuania lt.linkedin.com
Luxembourg lu.linkedin.com Macedonia mk.linkedin.com
Malaysia my.linkedin.com Malta mt.linkedin.com
Mauritius mu.linkedin.com Mexico mx.linkedin.com
Morocco ma.linkedin.com Nepal np.linkedin.com
Netherlands nl.linkedin.com New Zealand nz.linkedin.com
Nigeria ng.linkedin.com Norway no.linkedin.com
Oman om.linkedin.com Pakistan pk.linkedin.com
Panama pa.linkedin.com Peru pe.linkedin.com
Philippines ph.linkedin.com Poland pl.linkedin.com
Portugal pt.linkedin.com Puerto Rico pr.linkedin.com
Qatar qa.linkedin.com Romania ro.linkedin.com

Country URL Country URL
Russian Federation ru.linkedin.com Saudi Arabia sa.linkedin.com
Singapore sg.linkedin.com Slovak Republic sk.linkedin.com
Slovenia si.linkedin.com South Africa za.linkedin.com
Spain es.linkedin.com Sri Lanka lk.linkedin.com
Sweden se.linkedin.com Switzerland ch.linkedin.com
Taiwan tw.linkedin.com Tanzania tz.linkedin.com
Thailand th.linkedin.com Trinidad and Tobago tt.linkedin.com
Tunisia tn.linkedin.com Turkey tr.linkedin.com
Uganda ug.linkedin.com Ukraine ua.linkedin.com
United Arab Emirates ae.linkedin.com United Kingdom uk.linkedin.com
United States www.linkedin.com Uruguay uy.linkedin.com
Venezuela ve.linkedin.com Vietnam vn.linkedin.com
Zimbabwe zw.linkedin.com
Knowing this you can start to build a search string that will find you relevant LinkedIn profiles.

Making the Most of LinkedIn Groups
Everyone knows about LinkedIn groups, but not everyone knows just how powerful they can be.
Here are my top 5 ways you can make LinkedIn groups do more for you and your business.
Be a member of 50 Groups
A lot of people are put off of joining a lot of LinkedIn groups as they’re worried about drowning
in lots of emails. This doesn’t have to be the case - you can simply turn off emails from all groups
in your LinkedIn settings or adjust your settings for each group individually.
When you join a group, the people in it become a part of your LinkedIn network. LinkedIn will let
you join a maximum of 50 groups. Making the most of this will greatly increase the size of your
network and the number of people that you can see information about in your LinkedIn
searches.
You don’t have to stay a member of the same 50 groups all the time, you can chop and change
when you find bigger, better or more relevant groups.
Use Groups to message people you’re not connected to for free
Have you ever found someone you really want to get in touch with but don’t want to pay for an
InMail? If you have a group in common, you can message them for free.
If you don’t share a group, see if that person is a member of any groups and pick one to join.
You might have to leave one of your other groups if you are using your full allocation of 50.
Once you share a group with the person you want to contact you will have to visit the group and
search for them in the “Members” section. When you hover your mouse over their name, you
will now see the option to send them a message.

This is a proper message, with no character limit and no restriction on sending links, unlike an
invite to connect.
Use LinkedIn groups to identify talent
LinkedIn groups can be a great way to infer things about a person’s experience, specialisms or
interests. For example, a solicitor that is a member of a HR group might be more likely to
specialise in employment law, even if they don’t explicitly say so on their profile.
Once you are a member of a group it is easy to search its members simply by visiting the group’s
members section or using the Advanced Search features.
It’s not always possible to join a group. For example, some group managers don’t allow
recruiters to join.
If you are not a member of the group then you can still search it’s members. If you have a
LinkedIn Recruiter licence then you can easily search the members of ANY group using the filters
on the left hand side of your search results. If you have a basic LinkedIn account then it takes a
little more ingenuity.
To search the members of any LinkedIn group with a basic LinkedIn account, you will need to
have two windows open in your browser, both looking at LinkedIn. In the first window, run a
simple search looking for the keywords you hope to find on profiles. In the second window, find
the group whose members you want to search (for those keywords).
Once you have found the group you are interested in and opened it up in your browser, you
need to look in your browser’s address bar at the URL of the page and find the groups ID
number. The URL is usually in the format
http://linkedin.com/groups?gid=TheNumberYouWant?trk=......
Copy and paste the group ID number out of the URL, the number is usually 4 to 6 digits long.
Now return to the keyword search you did in the first tab. Using the filters on the left hand side
of the screen, select one of the groups you ARE a member of to filter by (it doesn’t matter which
one). Now look for that group’s ID number in the URL of the page and replace it with the number
of the group you DO want to search. The number you want to replace is often right at the far
end of the URL - so click in the address bar and hit the “End” button on your keyboard to go
straight there.

Hit enter and voila, you have searched members of your chosen group for the keywords you
need without needing to join.
Engage in LinkedIn Groups and become part of the community
LinkedIn groups seem to fall into three categories; the dead, the spammed and the useful. The
first two categories are only really useful to you as a way of expanding your network.
The third category is great if you actually want to become a part of the wider community you
work or recruit in. If you regularly show up and are helpful, people are more likely to help you
when you need it. Being helpful might mean sharing relevant content on a regular basis or it
might mean helping to answer the questions other group members are asking.
If you set yourself up as a useful member of a community (or LinkedIn group) when you need
help to find a candidate or a new job, members of that group will be more likely to help you.
Do be sure to post something more personal than a simple link to a job though, you wouldn’t
want to get SWAM’d. Just openly asking for help usually works best, with no links at all.
Run your own LinkedIn Group
What better way to set yourself up as a useful community member than being the person who
started the group in the first place? You are then also free to post whatever you like in the group
without any threat of moderation, you also have the ability to send out weekly messages to
group members.
Running a group isn’t easy though, it’s a big commitment and it takes a long time. You have to
dedicate the time to make sure your group never falls into the “dead” category and be careful
not to turn it into too much of a promotional vehicle and end up in the “spammed” camp.

Unlocking LinkedIn by Katharine Robinson - Discover Sourcing Workshop Handout 2013

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Unlocking LinkedIn by Katharine Robinson - Discover Sourcing Workshop Handout 2013