Social media is everywhere. It’s ingrained in our daily life. In just one minute, 87,500 tweets are sent and 1 million people log into Facebook. But social media isn’t only about connecting with friends and sharing your latest photographs. Social media can also be a valuable resource for businesses.
With over 675 million active monthly users, LinkedIn can be a powerful platform for both organizations and individuals looking to stand out within their industry. As a HR professional, LinkedIn can play an essential role in many of your daily tasks. In this article, we’ll be exploring all the ways LinkedIn Business can help you boost your HR efforts.
What are the business benefits of using LinkedIn?
LinkedIn offers many benefits for HR professionals, outside of social networking with other professionals. LinkedIn’s standard features can be used to conduct job candidate profile checks, to build your own personal brand, show off your company culture, or expand your network through LinkedIn Groups.
When recruiting new talent, you can use LinkedIn to perform a quick candidate profile check for job applicants. While we don’t advise basing your hiring decision off this, it can be a useful tool for gaining an insight into an applicant’s previous job history, achievements and current activity.
LinkedIn can also be beneficial for developing your own personal brand. As a HR professional your online actions may be considered representative of the company you work for. However, it’s also a representation of you as an individual. By ensuring your profile is up to date and that you are sharing valuable information, you can use LinkedIn to showcase your expertise within the HR industry.
The Human Resources department is usually responsible for ensuring a positive company culture exists within the organization. By working with your marketing department, you can use your company LinkedIn page to showcase your company story, share an insight into what it’s like working for your organization and show off your great company culture. Company pages are a great way to show people how your company goes above and beyond to ensure employee satisfaction.
LinkedIn is, of course, a social network and so it presents a great opportunity to build your professional network. By joining and being active in LinkedIn Groups you can build real-world relationships and connections with other professionals.
The HR benefits of LinkedIn don’t stop there. LinkedIn also has many additional features that can be used to further boost your HR efforts and, in turn, your business success.
What are LinkedIn Business Solutions?
Business Solutions on LinkedIn provides a hub of different paid-for services offering additional features for LinkedIn. Comprising talent, marketing, sales, and learning solutions, these LinkedIn Business Solutions can be advantageous for HR professionals.
While the standard LinkedIn features can be used to elevate your HR efforts, the LinkedIn Business Solutions will help you gain a competitive advantage against competitors by ensuring you have access to even more insights and features to support your HR activity.
How can you use LinkedIn Business to boost HR efforts?
If you are looking to hire new talent for your organization, LinkedIn Business Solutions can help you further your recruitment efforts with their Talent Solutions. LinkedIn reports that over 90% of LinkedIn members are open to job opportunities. Providing access to such a great pool of candidates, LinkedIn can be invaluable for improving your recruitment process.
With LinkedIn Talent Solutions, you can source talent using the recruiter search platform. The Recruiter platform helps you find, connect with, and manage candidates for job opportunities. You can also speed up the hiring process by using saved searches and candidate alerts. You can also stay up to date when your top candidates update their profile, making sure you’re ready to reach out with a job opportunity at the right time.
Whilst recruiting top talent is an important part of your role as a HR professional, it’s also important that you provide support for your current employees. Research shows that 76% of employees who don’t feel valued at work will seek other job opportunities. Therefore, as a HR professional, it is your duty to ensure employees feel valued at work and, as a result, have higher job satisfaction levels. Further to this, a learning report conducted by LinkedIn found that 94% of employees would stay at a company longer if it invested in their career development. Knowing employees value learning within the workplace, Learning Solutions by LinkedIn could be an ideal tool for your HR department.
LinkedIn’s Learning Solutions platform contains over 16,000 courses in seven languages so your employees can access the learning materials that are most suited to their career needs. Survey data by LinkedIn found that employees want access to self-directed, independent learning with 74% of employees wanting to learn during their spare time at work. By providing employees with a range of courses that they can undertake at their own pace, LinkedIn Learning Solutions can help you ensure your business is supporting employees by meeting their demand for self-directed learning opportunities.
Finally, you could work with your Marketing department to make sure that your marketing efforts on LinkedIn put your company in the spotlight. By teaming up with the Marketing department, you can use LinkedIn Marketing Solutions to create a variety of social media ads on LinkedIn that highlight your company culture, increase business awareness, and showcase employee engagement and satisfaction levels. Boosting employee engagement through your LinkedIn marketing is a great way to show prospective employees that you are a company that cares. You could create “Work With Us” ads that share existing employee testimonials and show prospective employees what it really means to work for your organization. Alternatively, you could use the Marketing Solutions platform to create ads that highlight your company values and strengthen your corporate reputation.
Final thoughts on boosting HR efforts through LinkedIn
There are many ways you can leverage LinkedIn for Business as a HR professional. Ultimately, you should plan to use LinkedIn as a tool for showcasing your company values, hiring new employees and building out your professional network of peers and partners. You will be able to boost your organization’s HR efforts by making use of LinkedIn’s various tools and features.
Whilst LinkedIn’s recruitment tools are ideal for helping you connect with top candidates for job vacancies, the learning tools will allow you to nurture and support your existing employees. By considering how LinkedIn can be used to showcase your company values and culture, you will be able to create content on LinkedIn that boosts your HR efforts and reaches your business goals.
About the Author: Jocelyn Pick
