Recruitalicious

I want to pose a question: how do you use  LinkedIn to source candidates? If you’re like me, you use the “Relevance” option to sort your search results. And while I thought this was a great way to help me find the best candidates, after reading a recent Boolean Black Belt blog post, I realized that I’ve ignored a large part of what LinkedIn has to offer.

My long-held assumption was that “Relevance” only returns results based on the words I enter. However, sorting by “Relevance” is the default value. Duh, why didn’t I know that?  I thought it was awesome that my computer knew me so well that it automatically went to “Relevance” to sort my search results (apparently, that’s not the case).

According to the post, when you sort by this value, you’re getting results based on what LinkedIn thinks is relevant, which differs greatly from how other source sites like Google, Twitter and Applicant Tracking Systems work. These sites sort according to what keywords are entered. LinkedIn sorts by a combination of factors– this includes what you searched for, but also your “social graph” (1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections).

About a year ago, LinkedIn launched a new search platform. It explained that the relevance of search results is affected by each person’s professional network on the site. Relationship is key. That means that LinkedIn tries to personalize the relevance, placing professionals that are most likely to be of interest to the one executing the search at the top of the first search results page.

The site’s Learning Center also explains the “relevance” term:

Sort by:

Relevance:

• If you’ve entered a value in the top keywords field, this will return the member for whom that keyword or keywords are the most relevant.

I had no idea a “sort by” option could matter that much! And I had no idea that another option may be the better one.

For those of you who want to sort candidates based on the keywords entered, good news: YOU CAN! Recruiters can sort by…drumroll please…KEYWORDS.

By using this option, the most relevant candidates to appear in a search are those that best match the search criteria specified by the recruiter, regardless of how closely connected they are to one another. That criteria could be specified by titles or companies, for example.

In conclusion, after reading the Boolean Black Belt post, I know that next time I used LinkedIn to source candidates, I’m using the “Keywords” option.

Images:  http://bit.ly/TLtYw

http://www.linkedin.com/search

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 11:38 am and is filed under Recruitalicious. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.