Recruiting through social media for junior and medior positions was already a trend, but now you’re increasingly finding job postings for management and even board positions on LinkedIn as well. What is the likelihood of success? Francine Rutgers tempers expectations. ‘It produces an awful lot of work, after which it often turns out in the end that the dream candidate did not respond.’
They deal with it regularly at Herman Rutgers: companies that post their vacancies on LinkedIn and ask the executive search firm if they want to include the candidates who respond to them in the selection process. Francine Rutgers: “We have now experienced a few searches of this kind. The client first posted the job on LinkedIn and received 80 to 100 responses. You can imagine how much work it is to review all those responses. Usually a searcher at the company does that; they look primarily at keywords in hopes of separating the vast amount of chaff from the wheat. But people often tailor their resumes to what they think is being searched for, so you never really get a good picture if you only select by keywords. Eventually, the client comes to the conclusion that the person they are looking for is not among the many responses. After which they spend a lot of time writing off all those people.
‘By the time the client knocks on our door, they are in a whooping hurry. We often find that the people we have on file have seen the position in question pass by but thought, I’m not going to respond to that. Or they did not see it because they were not actively orienting themselves at all. In short: the person you are looking for is not likely to actively respond to the job posting. A director of communications rarely applies via a LinkedIn post. From a certain job level on, people just don’t do that anymore.
Don’t you think you could enrich your file with new people reached through social media?
‘I think we have built such a good network over the years that we already know the people we think are relevant. Once in a while there may be someone interesting who is not yet in our database, but generally these are people who are still too junior or whose experience is not relevant enough. We recently happened to select candidates through a LinkedIn recruitment in addition to professionals from our own network. In the selection rounds with the client, our own candidates ultimately turned out to be the best fit .’
Why is that?
‘The candidates we propose are very carefully selected. We have 2600 people on file but that does not mean that all 2600 are suitable for the position in question. If we make a rough selection for a position, 40 candidates or more may also be considered initially. If we then go deeper and broader, we include all sorts of things in our assessment: the culture and stage of the organization, the desired personality et cetera. That leaves only a few people who we think are cut out for the position.
Do you advise clients against posting job openings on LinkedIn?
‘I don’t advise against it, because it’s also a signboard for your company; it gives you visibility as an attractive employer, for example. But you have to think carefully beforehand what you want with it. For junior and medior positions, recruiting via LinkedIn can be very successful, even for companies that want to build their own talent pool. But for a certain level positions – a director, a head of communications – those are typically the profiles you should have no illusions that you’re going to successfully find through LinkedIn. They are often people who themselves do not look at jobs on that medium at all. With senior specialists or end positions, it listens very closely what type of experience someone brings and what someone brings as a person.’
Of course, your added value is also that you have much more information than can be written down in the job description in the job posting.
‘Exactly. Especially for higher-level positions, a lot of confidential information is exchanged between a client and an executive search firm. Things that you don’t put in a job profile but that we keep in the back of our minds when talking to people. We also always want to know what the pink elephant in the room is.
Can you give an example of such a pink elephant in the room?
‘There may be a problem in a department with a specific employee. Then you know you need to find a manager with experience and an eye for this kind of thing, someone who does not shy away from confronting an employee who is digging in his heels. For example, because that employee himself applied in vain for the position of the new manager. This is quite common. That one is going to sit with his arms crossed looking at the new manager like, come on. If you don’t know that when you come in, you can react to it all wrong. But those are things we don’t put in the job profile, of course.
You do tell that to the candidate?
‘Of course, people need to know what they are getting into. It may also be that the company is on the eve of a merger or just about to divest certain parts. It may be very sensitive information that should not be shared, even with the candidates, but which we give due consideration to. We then look for someone who has supervised that kind of process more often.
If a client tells you that they put the job posting on LinkedIn and would also like to hire Herman Rutgers, what is your reaction?
‘We are always honest about our experiences with LinkedIn recruiting because we want to have clear expectations up front. We also like to help them, by saying: if you think on LinkedIn a couple of interesting candidates have responded, we are happy to include them in the selection. Then you get a clear picture because everyone is measured by the same yardstick. We also always recommend putting the job posting on your own website. After all, people who visit the website are already intrinsically interested in your company; if they respond to the job posting, that’s already positive. On LinkedIn, lots of people respond at random; they also apply to tig other companies with a kind of copy-paste story with – if they are smart – exactly the keywords searchers are looking for. A waste of everyone’s precious time!
