Are you using LinkedIn’s excellent new company “stalking tool” yet?

StalkingThis week I had the pleasure of running a social recruiting workshop for recruiters for REC – The Recruitment and Employment Confederation.

In chatting to the various consultants, I have to say that it still amazes me that the primary recruitment tool (in my opinion anyway) – LinkedIn – is still not being used properly (check out the most common mistakes made using LinkedIn). My recruitment industry colleague, Stephen Fowler had this same experience recently, when investigating LinkedIn usage.

It does seem that LinkedIn are “trying really hard” to please recruiters, and recently added a really neat little function – company stalking – sorry I mean  the ability to “Follow Companies”, that allows you to track any companies on LinkedIn. This is a great addition to the social recruiting armoury.

Linkedin follow feature

As you can see in the image below, I have gone to the Accenture company page, and on the right side is the “Follow Accenture” link. Very simply when you hit the “Follow Company Name” link, LinkedIn allows you follow all the activities that are linked to that company – primarily updates and employees – exactly what recruiters want to know. So, by following a company you could find out:

•    the new employees joining the company
•    the employees who leave the company
•    the employees that have been promoted
•    any new job opportunities
•    any company profile updates

You can choose whether to be notified of these changes daily or weekly (in notification settings).

So if you haven’t worked it out yet, this is a brilliant way for recruiters to let LinkedIn do their work for them.

You can now  follow your competitors, their turnover rates, any new starters  and any news going on in the company.
You can track companies that you have an interest in – as a target company to work with or as a source of candidates for other companies.
You can use it as a business development tool, to identify and track key individuals in companies, as well as learning of up to date information via their updates etc.
You can use it to start the engagement process with new candidates, by congratulating new recruits on their jobs, or existing employees on promotions.

However there are two things to note:

1. Following companies is public knowledge – anyone can see who your following.

2. LinkedIn relies on user generated content, so the company information is reliant on people updating their LinkedIn profiles, which may not always be very current – it just depends on the individuals.

I think the latest figure from LinkedIn is that you can follow up to 200 companies at any one time (just don’t do them all in one go or else LinkedIn might tag you as a robot spamming tool!)

So the message is simple – go and start your professional stalking with this new feature, it is brilliant!

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We consult, train, tweet, blog, text, post, speak, share, read, update, photograph, video and talk about recruitment. At Sirona Consulting we work with companies, recruitment agencies, RPO’s HR & recruitment technology vendors and conference / event organisers, helping them understand and integrate social media into their recruitment strategies. We have have been doing this now for twelve years, working with many companies along the way, from small independent recruiters right through to large international companies. We are honest, ethical and have experience of working across a range of different industry sectors delivering success in the UK, Europe, Middle East, APAC and the United States.

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