Darien Graham-Smith discovers how LinkedIn can help you find high-calibre staff, reach new customers and grow your business
Linkedln is a unique networking site with more than 380 million registered users. The basic functions are free, so if your business isn’t already signed up, you’ve nothing to lose by trying it out.
For many businesses, the primary value of Linkedln is to find and engage new staff. “A lot of small businesses don’t have a budget for recruitment,” said Alex O’Connor, a recruiter at Dennis Publishing - the parent company of PC Pro. “If someone leaves or retires, the company might not have the budget to hire an agency to find the best replacement. Linkedln connects you for free to a whole network of people who have an interest in your line of business.”
But the benefit isn’t just about cost, added Richard George, who is corporate communications manager at Linkedln. It’s also about reach: “Five or ten years ago, if I was a small business wanting to hire somebody new, I needed to post an ad in the local press or in the trade press. Or, I might ask my network of suppliers if they knew anybody suitable.”
“But when you’re posting an ad, you have to hope that the best person for the job is actively looking. You have to rely on them seeing the ad and finding you, in order for them to get the job. Our data shows that only one employee in five is actively looking for a new job at any one time. So that’s immediately 80% of people discounted. Your ad isn’t going to reach them, because they’re not looking for a job.”
That matters because the ability to attract the right talent can make or break a small organisation. “If you’re a small business, then you might be only hiring one or two people a year,” noted George, “so one new hire could be a significant percentage of your workforce. It’s hugely important that you find someone who’s the right fit, with the right background and the right skills.”
That’s where Linkedln can help - by enabling recruiters to get in touch with individuals who may not have been actively seeking a new role. “We probably fill 70% of our roles through Linkedln,” confirmed Leti Taylor, Dennis Publishing’s resource manager. “We have some very niche roles to fill, and you may not get a suitable applicant. With Linkedln, we can contact people who are aren’t looking on the job sites - people who wouldn’t have thought of applying until we approached them with an interest.”
“Today there are more than 35,000 companies around the world using Linkedln to find talent,” noted George. “We call that part of our ‘talent solution’.” Making it work is simply a case of being active on Linkedln, and building a network of connections so that you can find and reach the right people. “Just by having an active and up-to-date profile, and by growing your network, you can very quickly tap into a massive extended network of people who could be your next employee. Normal membership, having a profile on LinkedIn and growing your network is all free.”
The final step is to persuade the individuals you approach to take you seriously. That means investing a little time and effort in your own presence on LinkedIn, to create the allimportant first impression. “LinkedIn is mostly run by HR people,” said Taylor. “If you have an HR team, those are normally the best people to be in charge of your company page.”
“We make sure the company page is appealing,” agreed O’Connor. “You can scroll through the first six or seven posts on the Dennis Publishing page and see the variety of our business.” But that doesn’t mean personal profiles can be neglected: “When we contact a potential hire,” O’Connor pointed out, “the first thing they see is my profile. That immediately gives them a feel for the sort of people who work here.”
If it sounds like LinkedIn opens the door to rampant employeepoaching, then that’s sort of the point. But the Dennis HR team believes it ultimately helps employers and staff. “Headhunting will happen regardless,” pointed out Taylor. “If someone’s ready to move on, they’re going to leave sooner or later. Think of a really big, successful company: the employees at IBM might not be planning to leave tomorrow, but they all know their key competitors. They know what their options are.”
“But a happy person in the right role isn’t going to leave – and every happy employee’s profile is a window of advertisement, to attract others to come and work here. That’s why our aim is to get everybody active on LinkedIn. Yes, there are threats, but the potential benefits outweigh
the potential downsides.”
Promoting your business
While LinkedIn may be well-known as a recruitment tool, there’s much more to the site than that. “A few years ago, LinkedIn was, pretty much, just a place to go if you wanted to find a new job,” admitted Richard George. “But over the past few years we’ve put a lot more emphasis on relevant professional content such as industry articles, allowing people to share research and their own thoughts and experiences. Whatever role I’m in, whatever industry I’m in, I can come to LinkedIn and tap into all that shared knowledge and experience.”
In other words, the site is growing into a general-purpose social network for businesses – and that means there’s an opportunity to use it for promotion.
“LinkedIn helps you tell the right people about your company,” noted O’Connor. “It can help you make your small business look good. When you put the size of your company, you might be in the smallest category, which is 0-50 employees. People visiting your page don’t know whether you’ve got two people or 20.”
It can also be powerful for disseminating a marketing message. “Our ‘marketing solutions’ business lets companies put their messages and brands in front of the right people,” explained George. “A lot of small companies want to use social media to grow and promote their brand, and that makes sense. But social media gives the buyer access to huge amounts of information, and decision-making powers: it’s no longer the case that a company puts out a piece of business for tender and then everyone gets a fair shout at pitching for it. Increasingly, buyers and decision-makers can do their own research. They’re 60% or 70% of the way along the decision-making process before they engage a supplier.”
“So what’s unique about LinkedIn is that it’s all in a professional context. When somebody’s on LinkedIn, they’re doing their job. That means you can reach people when they’re in that frame of mind, especially if you’re in the B2B market.”
“It’s very different to Facebook,” agreed Alex O’Connor. “Although companies do use Facebook professionally, it’s seen as a personal service, and people don’t like to spend too much time on it at work. Whereas with LinkedIn, people feel that because it’s professional, it’s got all the business content on there, they can keep the site open all day. So when we post something from Dennis Publishing, we find we get a lot more engagement on LinkedIn, between the hours of nine and five, than we do on any other platform.”
As well as distributing your message, LinkedIn helps you target it: “On your company page, you can see all sorts of analytics – who’s coming to look at your page, and see how big your reach is, and, if you’re putting out content, you can see what’s working well,” explained O’Connor. “For a small company’s that’s really great information. If 80% of your views are from a particular area or background then you know to target that area. For example, say you’re a boutique shop, you’d want to connect to people who worked at local businesses, and who might regularly walk by. It’s basically free business intelligence, and free advertising. Why not make the most of it?”
Making sales
So, you’ve used LinkedIn to establish your brand, and to refine your marketing strategy: the next step is to engage. But who exactly should
you approach? “There are, on average, 5.4 decision-makers involved in every B2B decision today,” said Richard George. “So it’s a complex world for small businesses looking to sell to other businesses. There are more people they need to reach and influence in order to successfully make a deal. LinkedIn is a gift: it helps you identify the decisionmakers inside an organisation. So you can make sure your message is getting to the right place.”
And that needn’t necessarily mean cold-calling. “With LinkedIn, you can identify people who are already in your network who might be able to introduce you to potential clients,” George continued. “Let’s say I’m in a small company of ten or 20 people: if I want to reach out to a particular prospect, I’m probably not directly connected to them. We offer a self-serve tool called Sales Navigator that can tell me if someone in my network knows them already, so I can have a warm introduction.”
“That’s really valuable, because all the data shows that warm introductions lead to better business deals. The buyer has a relationship of trust already, so the salesperson is able to build their own relationship more quickly. And you don’t need to be in a big organisation to use it – you can buy a licence for yourself if you’re a sole trader, and pay for it every month with a credit card. It’s a really easy way to start finding new clients.”
LinkedIn can even help you improve the effectiveness of your sales approaches. “We’ve recently announced our new ‘sales solution’,” noted George. “We looked at a group of successful salespeople on LinkedIn and created a scoring system, based on what the best practices are and what makes an effective salesperson. That’s now available for free: you can go to the site and see what your score is, based on four measures of how effectively you’re using LinkedIn to promote yourself and your company. Over time, you can compare yourself to your network and industry as a whole, which gives you an insight into how to do better.”
Growing your business
We’ve seen how LinkedIn can quickly benefit your business. What about the longer term? “If you’re a small business, LinkedIn is a great way to see what your competitors are doing,” pointed out Leti Taylor. “You can learn from what they’re up to, and you can also look at larger companies – the ones that you want to be like in five or ten years’ time – and learn about what their focus is, and how they operate.”
“For example, when Dennis acquired buyacar.co.uk they were a team of six. In six months they had more than doubled, adding an extra ten people to their team, and were able to use LinkedIn to see how other similar companies had grown – as well as using the site to establish themselves as quite a cool online digital brand.”
“And, of course, it works both ways. When you go and look at who’s been viewing your profile, that’s not just about finding customers. It can also be very revealing when you see your competitors there. Say, one day, I open up our page and 79% of viewers are from – just as an example – H Bauer Publishing. You will know something’s going on: maybe they’re interested in something you’re doing, or something’s happened that’s made a lot of people think about moving.”
“There’s a lot you can get from LinkedIn, and you can even get training for free,” added O’Connor. “There are ‘webinars’ that can show you all the basics. It’s all really American, but then I think Americans do social media better than us Brits. LinkedIn is massive over there. Another one that’s huge is glassdoor.com, where employees rate the company they work for. We’re two years behind on that, but it’s coming – and it’s going to be just as big as LinkedIn.”