Recruit Top Graduates on LinkedIn

Editor's Notes

• #6: Script: Why is LinkedIn focusing on students this year? In the past we’ve been seeing more and more students join LinkedIn, but now we are actually hitting a critical mass. There are more than 30 million students and recent grads on LinkedIn globally. It’s our fastest growing audience and one of our most engaged. We aren’t the only ones seeing the growth, other analysts are seeing it too. The Achievers study states that “Compared to two years ago, the number of students using LinkedIn to find job opportunities has increased by 700%”. And it’s not just in the US – in fact the US only represents one third of this rapidly growing audience. And Europe is over 20%. Why are Students & Recent Graduates joining LinkedIn? The growing realisation and awareness that this is where professional employers hang out. Plus the people, the networks, that can help them identify and establish their careers. You want to be a professional working at XYZ? – then you’d better start behaving like one. DATA: “Compared to two years ago, the number of college students using LinkedIn to find job opportunities has increased by 700%.” Experience and Achievers surveyed nearly 8,000 soon-to-be college graduates of 2012 and 2013. Survey: http://www.achievers.com/resources/whitepaper/class-2012-understanding-needs-your-future-workforce
• #7: We’re also able to gain data insights into the growing supply and demand of recent graduates on LinkedIn. This graph illustrates a snapshot of the UK today – the horizontal axis, shows increasing Member numbers – to the right we can see The Open University, The University of Manchester and the University of Leeds leading the way in terms of LinkedIn members. However, when we take into account the vertical axis, representing Demand or how often employers are searching / targeting these university graduates, we can see there is more demand right now for The Open University grads, whilst Leeds remains relatively Untapped. We’ll be benchmarking this every 6 months to see how it trends – but it is a great example of how we can provide real data insights to our clients to help with their recruitment planning.
• #8: We’re seeing the university recruiting space as a three-sided ecosystem. At LinkedIn, we have teams and strategies to service each of these parties. For students, we enable them to connect, gain insights, and find their career paths. For universities, around the world, we help them achieve their key goals of students & alumni success. We have partnered with over 23,000 universities globally and recently launched dedicated University Pages. Similar to Company Pages, University Pages are attached to all students and alumni from that university and allow university administrators to brand their universities – Careers Services, Alumni Services and Marketing working together. It’s a great place for students, universities and employers to collaborate and have open discussions on key topics such as career fairs. For employers, we leverage LinkedIn’s data to help you efficiently attract, engage, and hire the right people. All 3 sides need to work together – Students want to see relevant University and Employer content, to have the opportunity to engage, learn and make informed decisions. Employers want to see talent, target the right messages to the right people, enhance their brand, and hire efficiently.
• #9: All 3 sides need to work together – and this month we also launched the new Education Portal, designed to provide resources, training and insight to the different members of this ecosystem – for universities yes. But also for prospective students looking at selecting a University and Course - and Current Students looking for career and employer insights (for internships, placements, graduate roles). Students want to see relevant University and Employer content, to have the opportunity to engage, learn and make informed decisions. Employers want to see talent, target the right messages to the right people, enhance their brand, and hire efficiently. I encourage all parties to go and explore this Portal.
• #10: Right, before we talk about best practices, let’s understand what students are doing on LinkedIn
• #11: Script: Today we have a new generation of students, that we like to call Gen “C” - C stands for Content. As you’d expect this audience is very tech-savvy; digital natives - social is their native habitat. They grew up using Social Networks; they primarily use LinkedIn to research companies, explore trends, and get inside scoop on careers from classmates, friends & family. Students, by definition, are active candidates. They are looking for a job and if the information is out there, they will find it. Their behaviors are very different from passive candidates. This generation is quick, connected and engaged.
• #12: Script: First order of business is to establish an identity. The LinkedIn profile was previously a basic “title and company” form. This profile didn’t work for this new “Generation C” where content matters. So we’ve evolved it. The LinkedIn profile now enables students to express their creativity; your profile is not just a digital CV – where you can add rich media content such as videos, Slideshare presentations, links, PDFs, photos, portfolios etc – anything to make you stand out from the crowd and demonstrate your achievements and your potential. They can enter information about their education such as test scores, schools / colleges / universities, degree of study as well as rich media content. Many of these facets are now searchable and targetable to help Employers find and reach out to the right candidate. Students can now create rich profiles even without full-on work experience.
• #13: Script: After establishing an identity on LinkedIn, students now have access to the new University Pages we mentioned earlier. Already 1,500 universities have activated their new pages this month, sharing rich media content, and relevant stories/news/resources through targeted status updates, links to relevant Groups, and connections into Alumni. These are set to become the primary resource for researching universities, courses and careers options. We also envisage there being future opportunities for Employers to engage in these spaces.
• #14: Script: Talking of Alumni, Students will look to connect with peers, professors and mentors to learn more about career opportunities. We have 238M members on LinkedIn. We know where they went to university, what they studied, where they worked and where they are now. We want to surface this information to students and help them leverage it in their quest for a career. You may not have heard of the School Alumni tool – but those who have will know it is an extremely useful tool – not just for students but also for Universities and Employers. We built this solution to help students discover their career path. In this instance, pretending to be Isabella, a current student at University of Durham. I went to the University Alumni tool and through filters found who went to University of Durham and has experience in Finance – Risk Management… what field they studied, what are their top skills. The tool also gives students a list of alumni from their school in their network. These are your brand ambassadors. Students will 1>reach out to alumni for advice and counsel, 2> leverage the networks of their parents, family, friends, and mentors to get a head start on their career planning, and 3> stay connected and establish lifelong relationships with alumni. We are promoting the School Alumni tool on the homepage of students. The Alumni tool is also a useful resource for Employers to research Universities they might partner with, or to target Second Jobbers from target universities who joined competitors. Also students are some of the most engaged members on Groups. Why? They want to get the inside-scoop on their careers and join the experts to get valuable mentorship. The Intel Student Lounge is a very popular group, demonstrating how an organisation can effectively engage with their target audience.
• #15: Script: Finally, students are proactively doing their homework to find the best career opportunities. We’ve built a Student Jobs Portal, giving students a one-stop-shop to see all internship and graduate entry-level positions that are right for them. Do you have your students jobs on LinkedIn? Students are power users of LinkedIn. They over-index on all sort of engagement metrics compared to our average member. They are actively researching company information on career pages and are access jobs via the portal but also on their mobile phones. Did you know LinkedIn jobs now appear on mobile? And that they can apply to these jobs with from their mobile?
• #16: Script: Student recruiting has turned into social recruiting - where students will research for the best opportunities, connect offline as well as online, and engage with alumni & recruiters to help them focus and achieve their career goals.
• #17: So what does that mean for Employers who want to talk to Isabella and her friends…?
• #18: Script: LinkedIn helps you amplify your university recruiting efforts in 3 ways: Build your brand on LinkedIn, engage with the right student with the right content, and leverage latest technologies to help you own the candidate experience and recruit more efficiently. Our goal is to help you converge your two worlds by connecting your offline efforts with scalable online strategies.
• #19: Script: Once you’ve defined your brand, you want to showcase it in places that students will go to look for information. We highly recommend that you expand the content on your career page to include information relevant to students, since a lot of students are coming to company pages to learn more about what it’s like working at your company.
• #20: Script: After you build your brand, you want to engage with the right students using the right content. Students are increasingly coming to LinkedIn to find career opportunities, and we are making it easier than before to do so. In addition to the Student Jobs Portal that we discussed earlier, we have also included education facets into our Jobs Recommendation engine (such as field of study, graduation dates and degree) so that the right job is targeted to the right student. We have also placed our jobs on mobile where we see a tremendous amount of activity from students. You must have all of your student jobs on LinkedIn, they allow you to have your seat at the table when students are evaluating career opportunities. STUDENT JOBS ARE CURRENTLY FREE.
• #21: Position: products exist today, tailoring to students Targeting capabilities: Status Update – no student targeting Career Page – no student targeting Ads – school, degree, graduation dates Talent Direct – school, degree, field of study, graduation dates
• #22: Script: Students are the most engaged group members on LinkedIn. They want to join the experts and participate in communities important to them. It’s an opportunity for you to brand your company as a “thought-leader” in helping students find their dream job. You can own the ad space on the group or build a fully customized group. List your campus events, guide students to your application flow, gain insights on what students care about by engaging in an open discussion. Students will join and participate. They’ll be looking to include modules for competitions, events, countdown clocks, photos, more video, more flexible content modules to do things like hints and tips for resumes, 60 second interviews around why join etc.
• #23: Now let’s talk about another important part of Student engagement and recruitment – those on-campus events. They’ve been running for years and still represent a great way to raise your profile and engage large numbers of potential hires who have not yet determined what they want to do - nor where they want to do it. But we all know that they can be extremely hard work…
• #24: So now we’d like to introduce a brand new tool to help you optimise your campus events effectiveness – LinkedIn CheckIn – CheckIn allows you to create a campus event interface where students / prospects can quickly and easily register their interest in your career opportunities. These 3 words neatly sum up what we have sought to deliver - SIMPLE. MOBILE. DATA-DRIVEN. Simple – for employer to set up and manage, for the candidate to use Mobile – works across all platforms and web browsers – could be using a tablet at a campus fair, or providing a link on your website, QR code, flyers – for students to register themselves on their own mobile device Data-driven – quickly and easily capturing the information about all your registrations in one place on LinkedIn – so you can quickly analyse the results of your events, your ROI. And build talent pools for long-term engagement – such as building relationships with First Years as they progress through University; or keeping tabs on Graduates that go to work at your competitors – but remain quality targeted hires.
• #25: So let’s take a quick look at how CheckIn works…
• #26: Firstly, how can you set up a new event?
• #27: The CheckIn tool sits in the LinkedIn back-office Recruiter platform. Setting up a new Event is quick and easy. 1. Select your Company and Logo 2. Select your brand theme colour 3. Customize the welcome message (keep simple)
• #28: Set up Areas of Interest. Candidates will have the option to select one or more – you will then be able to target communications to the relevant prospects – e.g. Finance
• #29: Now some back office details to help with tracking and filtering – such as the University, project folders, and Tags to aid in developing and engaging specific talent / skill pools
• #30: So here is our CheckIn dashboard now that we have created and run some events… Pending forms = those events we have set-up but not yet gone live Active forms = those events that are live right now Form Archive = those events that have run previously and are now closed We can see how many credits are left (44 top right) – and we can go into one of the Active Events to examine performance and registrations etc….We can do this in real time whilst the event is running, or afterwards.
• #31: Typically it takes less than 5 minutes to set up a new event. You can also duplicate existing events and configure specific details rather than starting from scratch. In creating an event you have actually created a Registration Microsite – the system generates a URL (web address) that you and your team can use across multiple devices.
• #32: Here we see the user interface we just set-up. The prospect can enter name and email address (phone number optional) – and click through to the next screen…
• #33: So here – let’s call it scenario 1 - LinkedIn has taken my details and matched me to my LI profile. A 2nd scenario might be that LinkedIn has suggested a couple of profiles – but they are not me – maybe I have an alternative email address I used with my profile, so I can change that And the 3rd scenario – that I don’t have a LinkedIn profile (YET) – I can click this button and still proceed with checking in.
• #34: So I may have successfully matched to my profile, or I may not have a profile – both are acceptable and both direct me to proceed to this Interest Areas screen – which we configured earlier. I can select one or more areas of interest and proceed….
• #35: And I’m done – I have completed my registration. So where the registrant has no LinkedIn profile – we will still collect name, email, the event, areas of interest – we will just not have the profile. Of course, for those who have matched to their existing LinkedIn profile we will have a whole host of information to help our screening, networking and engagement.
• #36: So let’s take a look at how these CheckIn event registrations appear in LinkedIn.
• #37: So here is our CheckIn dashboard now that we have created and run some events… Pending forms = those events we have set-up but not yet gone live Active forms = those events that are live right now Form Archive = those events that have run previously and are now closed We can see how many credits are left (44 top right) – and we can go into one of the Active Events to examine performance and registrations etc….We can do this in real time whilst the event is running, or afterwards.
• #38: Drilling down into individual profiles of registered prospects… Tag = any tags from CheckIn registration can be used for filtering / talent pooling – or you might add further Tags (let’s say you spoke to 10 exceptional candidates and you want to flag them in the system – add a tag “Star” and then you can find them quickly Notes = Event information and Interest areas are captured here – you can search on these to get specific talent pools Contact information = you can contact individually or in bulk – with a full audit trail for the team
• #40: In Summary….
• #41: Thank you. OK we have the chance for some Q&A– Amy, do we have any questions coming through? Well thank you everyone for joining, we hope it has been useful and informative. If you are interested in following up on any of these graduate hiring solutions, please talk to your LinkedIn contact – or if you do not have one then….