LinkedIn best practices

3 Ways Executives Can Use LinkedIn to Attract Top Talent

If you are reading this you have probably heard a million times that a strong talent brand is crucial to attracting high-quality talent. What you probably haven’t heard is that over 70% of employees believe that the social presence of their company’s CEO and executive team can strongly influence the company’s ability to attract talent.

If you are unsure how to start building out your presence online or how social networks like LinkedIn can help you attract stellar talent for your company, read on. The tips below are based on our “12 Steps to Becoming a Social Leader” playbook, which designed to help executives establish a solid LinkedIn presence.

How to establish your presence on LinkedIn

1. Create an effective executive profile:

It may sound quite obvious, but creating a great profile on LinkedIn is the first step to building out an impactful online brand. Below are some tips on how to pick out the right profile picture, headline, vanity URL, and how to fill out your professional information using multimedia instead of plain text.

executive profile on LinkedIn

2. Control your privacy & confidentiality:

Some executives are concerned that once they get on social media, they will be inundated with connection requests and messages they cannot handle. On LinkedIn you can control your privacy settings closely and tailor your experiences, based on who you wish to interact with:

privacy settings on LinkedIn

3. Efficiently connect with the people that matter:

The power of LinkedIn is the breadth of its network (300M+ professionals). Take advantage of that and build out meaningful connections with your colleagues, customers, and business partners. You can also use the network search functionality and find out more about the background and experience of your connections.

Connections on LinkedIn

How to attract higher-quality talent through LinkedIn

Once you have followed the basic steps to establishing a solid online presence, here are a few ways you can use LinkedIn to attract talent:

1. Leverage your network to source top talent:

As you build out your network of online connections, you can always rely on it when you are the hiring manager for a hard-to-fill position. On LinkedIn, you can reach out to people you know who have the skills you need or you can ask your network for high-quality referrals. Also, keep an eye out on your newsfeed: it contains updates, blog posts, career move alerts and other events that will be helpful when searching through your network for talent.

2. Identify who in your network can tell you more:

When researching a prospective candidate or company, you can see your work history overlap and how closely you are connected. Use your first or second degree connections to find out more information about the prospect, and ask for introductions.

how-you-are-connected

3. Show the authentic and human face of your company:

Here is where you can help your company bring its talent brand to the next level. Having an active presence on LinkedIn will help you establish a more personal connection and rapport with your company’s customers, employees and prospects. People will see you as approachable and engaged and will follow you in order to hear what you have to say.

And what you have to say does matter. Use your profile to like and share status updates from your LinkedIn Company Page and spread the news about exciting company events, initiatives, and news. You can also take advantage of the LinkedIn publishing platform and write and publish blog posts that showcase your own industry influence and thought leadership. For example, Bill Gates publishes a new blog post every few months and has amassed over 2 million followers.

CEOs-on-LinkedIn


For more tips, download the Executive Playbook containing 12 key steps to set you up for success as a social leader and as a true talent brand representative for your company.

How executives can use linkedin

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