Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion

LinkedIn has announced some additions and refurbishments to their Talent Advantage tools, a suite of solutions for recruiters who source and target candidates on the professional network. Now companies can customize their company profiles with viewer-aware information that can adapt to the viewer’s location, industry, and function to enhance their employer brand.

Included in the Talent Advantage suite is LinkedIn Recruiter, which allows recruiters to source for talent, the Jobs Network for job postings, Talent Direct, which lets recruiters send InMail campaigns to potential candidates, Employer Advertising, and the newly-launched Custom Company Profiles.

LinkedIn has also made improvements to LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Jobs Network to include Talent Match, a proprietary technology that automatically recommends talent matches for job postings.

Francois Dufour, Senior Director of Enterprise Marketing, said that the debut of these new tools is great timing for recruiters who are handling tight budgets. This is important, he noted, considering that around 530,000 recruiters utilize LinkedIn as a candidate source to some degree.

“This year it will be costlier to have a bad hire,” Dufour said. “They’ll have to make do with fewer resources, smaller budgets, smaller teams. Our solutions help recruiters be more efficient.”

The addition of LinkedIn Custom Company Profiles will now allow recruiters to develop their employer brand and engage both passive and active candidates with content specifically designed for particular profiles.

Dufour spotlighted Burger King as a model example of what the accentuated company profiles will look like.

Companies can choose to add general recruiting text or introductions and then can showcase people who are recruiting specifically for a given function or location. Dufour said that even if a person is browsing a company profile and isn’t interested in finding another job, they can view how they are ‘linkedin’ to others within the corporation.

Companies can also create a page for average consumers that demonstrates new products or projects. For example Burger King might choose to dedicate a page to exhibiting the Whopper, or Apple could link to a page that explains a new notebook.

So far Dufour said the response to the suite of tools has been positive. Recruiters are enjoying unlimited access to LinkedIn’s passive and active professionals and companies report that they are spending less money on third parties.

“LinkedIn Talent Advantage lets recruiters unlock the power of LinkedIn’s extensive professional network so they can uncover quality passive candidates who are unlikely to be on traditional job boards,” said Dufour. “Over 900 leading companies already depend on LinkedIn’s recruiting solutions. The hiring market has changed, and the new LinkedIn Talent Advantage is a game-changer for the human resources community.”

Popularity: 6% [?]