Think Like a Recruiter while on LinkedIn
December 18th, 2009 | by Jason Alba |In the last post I talked about how to cheat the system by joining Groups (in regards to contacting people you find on LinkedIn).
Here’s another tactic, though, which I’ve used. When I find a target contact I will use the internal messaging if I have to. I like LinkedIn Introductions, to a point… but what might be better is just a plain old email to the target contact.
However, if you are not a first degree contact it might be really hard to find an email for the person.
Now it’s time to start thinking like a recruiter. If a recruiter found the perfect candidate, and the email wasn’t there, that would not stop them from moving forward.
A recruiter would look for another way to contact the person - phone (whitepages.com) or email or something else.
Recently I found someone who I wanted to contact. It was the CEO of a company. In doing some company research (first on LinkedIn, to find other employees there, then on their blog) I found the naming convention of their corporate email addresses.
How? I found two employees who had their email addresses posted online (0utside of LinkedIn). Both of their email addresses had the same naming convention… so I GUESSED on the CEO’s email.
It worked - within 24 hours I had a reply to my email, from the CEO.
Just because you can’t message someone through LinkedIn’s mechanisms, don’t stop! Find other ways to get in front of that person - when I’m stuck I think “what would a recruiter do?” Tacky, I know, but they do this stuff all day long.
6 Responses to “Think Like a Recruiter while on LinkedIn”
By Sara on Dec 18, 2009 | Reply
I wish LinkedIn would make it easier to contact people, but it is what it is I guess. Thank you for your wonderful tips. To make it easier for people to contact me, I provide a link to my VisualCV resume in my profile, and my e-mail address is right at the top of the resume. I’ve made most of my LinkedIn profile public, so everyone can access the link.
By Don on Dec 18, 2009 | Reply
Jason - I could not agree with you more. In this job or selling market, you need to be both creative and persistent.
I took a similar approach in researching a company I was interested in. In addition to reaching out to employees (of the 3 I contacted, 2 replied within 48 hours), I reached out to a few of their partner organizations (this company sold product through resellers only. the position I was looking at was a reseller manager. who better to tell me the good, the bad and the ugly than the people who I would be managing). I sent out 5 emails and 2 replied.
One other comment….if you there are a few different possible email address structures for a company (i.e. Microsoft has so many employees, they have had to expand/change their email structure - firstname.lastname or firstnamelastinital or lastname.firstname…) ALWAYS send 1 email to each email address. This way you will know which email address is the correct one through a process of elimination…for the bad ones you will get a “UNDELIVERABLE” notification. Chances are it you do not get a notification, you have the right email address.
By Bill Kerschbaum on Dec 18, 2009 | Reply
Thanks, Jason. So what are the advantages to contacting someone outside of LinkedIn, in your opinion?
-Bill.
By Jason Alba on Dec 21, 2009 | Reply
@Sara - good point… however allowing anyone to communicate with other users would take away possible revenue opps for LI
@Don, Very nice - I just blogged about this today - quoting you
@Bill - I’ll post a response to your question on Wed
By Gary Donnelly on Jan 7, 2010 | Reply
You all have hit the “new” nail on the head. I’ve been telling people that the rules have changed drastically within the last 9 months that I’ve been out of work. Forget about contacting HR departments directly. You’ll most likely get a “dead” voicemail and you won’t get a response. I have also used these ways of “cheating” the system to reach out to contacts with mixed results. But I have gotten results. With no other viable alternative this is the way to go…until companies figure out what we as job seekers are doing and come up with a way to ignore us once again. As I continue to tell friends job search rules are changing fast and we have to be resourceful and creative in our approach.