LinkedIn can be an incredibly useful tool for anyone in business, whether you’re in HR, startups or even sales. Particularly when hiring, you can uncover a wealth of information about potential employees with a simple search. You can connect with people, long before you need to fill a position, and build lasting connections. You can even list open jobs on LinkedIn to bring in applicants.
But the success of the world’s largest professional networking site is also its Achilles Heel. Because among the +225 million profiles, are a bunch of people who just don’t get it.
Yep, it’s time to call out the LinkedIn Lemons.
We’ve all been guilty of it at times, but it’s time to stop. If you’re using LinkedIn for recruitment, you need to avoid being one of the Lemons.
To make it easy, here are 21 ways to be a LinkedIn Lemon. The choice is yours…
1. Have an incomplete profile.
It’s just the page that says you’re ‘for real’ to anyone who you contact through LinkedIn, so why bother?
2. Spam your contacts constantly.
Whether you’re asking for a recommendation or need an introduction, you can send messages to your network every day.
3. Jam ‘open roles’ into every space in your profile.
Why not post your job listings in the summary on your personal profile page? After all, maybe a few more people will see them. Sure, LinkedIn has several ways to specifically share listings, but maybe they’re not enough.
4. Don’t even consider a LinkedIn Premium Account.
Every other social network is free. Why should you bother paying for LinkedIn?
5. Avoid setting up a company page entirely.
Prospective employees might search for information about your company, but if they’re really dedicated to their job hunt, they should be able to find your website somewhere eventually.
6. Forget to share any news about your company or yourself.
LinkedIn is a social network, but that doesn’t mean that you should put effort into networking.
7. Bid low on Sponsored Jobs.
LinkedIn’s Sponsored Jobs ranks listings by bids for the top placement in the ad block. If you keep your bids low, your listing may not appear to many candidates, but you won’t have to spend much money, either.
8. Don’t encourage other employees at your company to create profiles.
They might not perfectly reflect the company, so why take the chance?
9. Stay out of LinkedIn groups.
Or only venture in when you need to hire. It’s just sharing information about industries, companies and other topics. Nothing important here!
10. Submit job listings to every group you join, not just the relevant ones.
No one will mind constant off-topic posts in their groups.
11. Ignore analytics for your recruiting efforts.
LinkedIn has built the Talent Brand Index, which gives you numbers on your reach and effectiveness — but reading and acting on those numbers is so much work.
12. Forget to tie LinkedIn into the rest of the metrics you collect on recruiting.
Even if it’s a core strategy, you just need to know it works — not where you could improve.
13. Send every single Tweet and status update to all your social network.
Just because you can have your tweets automatically sent to LinkedIn means you should.
14. Ignore your connections’ networks.
There’s no way friends of friends could ever make good hires.
15. Assume that LinkedIn’s corporate recruiting tools are out of your price range.
LinkedIn doesn’t publish prices. Insanely high prices must make a positive ROI impossible.
16. Rely solely on LinkedIn InMail to contact attractive prospects.
Send all your messages to candidates through LinkedIn. They’re sure to check their LinkedIn inbox hourly.
17. Only look at active candidates.
Since LinkedIn lets each member list if they’re actively looking, you should ignore anyone who doesn’t want to publish that they’re interested in a new job.
18. Don’t bother with LinkedIn keywords.
Search terms may make things easier, but that will just mean you’ll have more potential candidate profiles to go through.
19. Ignore your competitors on LinkedIn.
You don’t need to worry about comparing how you present yourself or tracking what their employees are going on to.
20. Avoid building up your own personal network on LinkedIn.
If you’re on there just to help your company, you don’t need to bother with creating a personal presence — even thought there are some people out there who will only respond to a personal approach.
21. Only spend time on LinkedIn when you have positions you actively need to fill.
The site will be there every time you need to find someone new – it’s easy enough to start from scratch.
We’ve all seen (and possibly been!) a LinkedIn Lemon. It’s time to stop!
What have we missed??
Author
Michael Overell
Michael Overell is a seasoned entrepreneur and business leader with a proven track record in building companies, products, and teams in both startup and hyper-growth environments. Currently, he serves as a key executive at ClassDojo, where he is responsible for driving revenue growth and helping children around the world access quality education. Michael is also actively involved in investing and providing support to promising foreign founders looking to break into the US market through his work with Antipodes.
