Articles - Sourcing and Research

Everyone knows, or should know, that to make the most out of LinkedIn, you need a decent sized network. Whether your main use of the site is for recruiting, marketing, branding, or otherwise, the bigger your network, the more exposure you will receive.

When people sign up, the first thing they do is contact people they know that are on the network and invite them to be a connection. And this is a great way to start, however, it usually results in a fairly small network. But everyone has a small network when they first start out, and are often bewildered as to how to go about increasing that number of first level connections. Here are a few easy ways to get things going.

• Run searches for those of importance to you – invite them to be a part of your network. Hopefully, most of you do this already. Depending on what type of recruiter you are, you will want those types of people in your network.
  Even if you are connected to someone already at a 2nd or 3rd degree level, you can still invite you to become first level connections, the positive there being you then have a larger portion of their network in yours.
  
  
• Search LinkedIn Groups, then join the ones of interest to you. Once you are a member of a group, LinkedIn allows you to search members of that group. You can do this from the Advanced Search page. Over on the middle right. This is another batch of LinkedIn members that you will want to invite to be a part of your network.
  
  
• Let LinkedIn search your email accounts (hotmail, gmail, yahoo, aol) for LinkedIn members you know. Then you can send them an invitation all at once. Go to Contacts, then Add Connections.
  
  
• Join an open networker group or two. TopLinked (www.toplinked.com) is very active and will send you a spreadsheet every week with people that would like to connect with you. LIONS is another group I am a member of. It is a LinkedIn group. I get invitations regularly from other open networker group members that see that I am a member.
  
  
• One other way to increase your connections using TopLinked is to go to their list of Top 50. Invite these people to connect with you. They will accept. And your 2nd and 3rd degree networks will grow like crazy.
  
  
• Add your LinkedIn profile address to your email signature. Then every email you send will be a potential new connection. I have had hundreds of invitation just from this one technique.
  
  
• Cross-link your LinkedIn profile address to your other social media profiles. If you are on FaceBook, or any other networks, make sure your LinkedIn profile is easy to find.

So, by no means is this a comprehensive list, however, they are all easy, not very time consuming, and free. Give them a try and see if you can increase your LinkedIn connections.

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BIOGRAPHY

Mark E. Berger; CPC, CIR, has been in recruiting and staffing since 1979. He is currently the owner of Swat Recruiting, a firm supporting the technology needs of the recruiting and staffing industry. He is also a partner in Ramsey Fox, Inc., an IT services firm, and its predecessor, M.E. Berger & Associates, since 1986. He has been heavily involved in Internet recruiting and has become an expert on recruiting and sourcing products and services available to the recruiting industry and also has a high level of expertise in recruiter databases (ATS’s), including how these products add to the bottom line.

 Mark started utilizing the Internet for candidate sourcing back in the early 1990s by first running classified ads on the text versions or AOL and Compuserve. Then he was an early user of some of the very first online resume databases including Career Mosaic, Headhunter.net, and Online Career Center. In the latter part of the 90s he learned advanced techniques to source passive candidates from the Internet using the search engines, primarily utilizing Alta Vista and Northern Lights in the beginning and is now an advanced user of today's popular search engines including Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

More recently, Mark has been teaching the recruiting community best practices as they relate to the social and business networks including LinkedIn, Twitter, FaceBook, and MySpace and how recruiters can utilize those networks for recruiting, marketing, and branding.

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