We participated as speakers in an interesting round table on this topic, during the event Who is looking for you on LInkedin? organized by Federmanager Toscana e hosted by the Florence Learning Center of GE-Nuovo Pignone in Florence.
I am Tina Riis and with me on the panel were Francesca Deidda, Global Executive Recruiter, Baker Hughes – a GE company, and Carmelo Trusso, Director of Ortec IT – both very active in identifying the best talents for their organizations using tools such as Linkedin.
Having worked as headhunter and being among the first in Italy to use LInkedin (since 2005), I reached LinkedIn’s 30.000 contacts per account limit a few years ago.
Professional visibility
More than 600 milion people have a Linkedinprofile and there are 13 milioni users in Italy alone. This platform has become essential to managing your career, but simply being present is not enough to reap all the benefits.
My main contribution to the round table discussion was to describe the work of a headhunter and how headhunters use Linkedin. In fact, the ‘reverse-engineering’ of the recruiting process is useful for any candidate interested in positioning her/himself better in the market, and be found – and therefore selected – more easily.
First of all, it is essential to understand that behind this type of tools there are algorithms creating a link between number of direct contacts and profile visibiity. A headhunter typically has many direct contacts while a candidate, especially candidates with a long professional experience, has few. This simple fact greatly hinders the possible meeting between the two.
The second challenge is to create a profile that will actually be selected by the headhunter.
Linkedin has become a very sophisticated tool that offers many functions to enrich a personal profile with information that feeds the search algorithm. For a headhunter, having an increasingly detailed, precise and predictive tool greatly facilitates the work because it allows you to contact fewer candidates in the screening process.
Consequently, the candidate who does not enrich their profile risks never being selected for an interview.
On the contrary, for candidates interested in improving their visibility, the platform provides various metrics to evaluate performance.
Career management
We provide personalized support and advice to managers determined to remain competitive in a rapidly changing market.
Visibility on a platform like Linkedin is the starting point of a more extensive career management process aimed at strengthening one’s professional profile and adapting the job search process to an increasingly digital recruiting reality.
In this process we define together how to emphasize the technical and organizational skills already acquired. We also critically analyze the skills of the manager in relation to new marketrealities by evaluating use cases of special interest to the manager (e.g. manufacturing, services, fashion, sustainability, big data, etc).
In a few weeks the manager will have the tools to better position her/himself on the market with a personalized action plan.
Last but not least, the manager can benefit from our operational network and, if relevant, interact with ongoing innovation projects to facilitate implementation of her/his action plan.
If you are interested in more information, please contact: tina.riis@daivai.com
