Is LinkedIn Harming the Collaborative Hiring Process?

With over 300 million registered world-wide members and over 3 million registered company pages, LinkedIn may seem like a godsend for hiring managers looking to recruit workers to their logistics companies. Although looking to LinkedIn may seem like the obvious choice when sourcing, recruiting and ultimately hiring potential employees, sometimes the obvious choice isn’t always the best one.

Despite the wide activity on the site, hiring managers should be wary of using LinkedIn as the end-all-be-all recruiting method, and here’s why.

How LinkedIn Can Damaging Hiring
Hiring should be a collaborative process, and when a company just turns to LinkedIn for its efforts, it is missing out on this collective effort. LinkedIn presents a virtual representation of an individual and gives them the ability to present themselves however they please. Users can upload whatever information they want to their profile – and let’s face it, people can sometimes misrepresent themselves. In fact, in a recent survey, 98 percent of LinkedIn users reported that their LinkedIn profiles contain at least one lie and on average, each LinkedIn profile contains at least three lies, according to Business Insider. It’s a lot easier to lie on a LinkedIn profile than it is to lie when sitting in front of a recruiter or on a phone screening call.

Many hiring managers turn to LinkedIn as their only source in the hiring process because they simply don’t have the time or network to find the right employees for their company. However, with 300 million existing LinkedIn users, sifting through all of those profiles can be quite time consuming, and if you don’t have a strong LinkedIn network or company presence, then you may be missing out on hundreds of candidates that may be the right fit for the open position.

Similarly, 68 percent of employees in the logistics industry are above the age of 45, and studies show that once an individual hits the age of 45, the likelihood that they are on LinkedIn dramatically drops, according to Quantcast. These findings demonstrate that for hiring managers looking to source talent for upper-level management positions with a longer track record of experience, the likelihood that they are even on LinkedIn decreases. Recruiting managers may just be looking for candidates on these sites that aren’t there and may be missing the best talent altogether.

How to Effectively Use LinkedIn as a Sourcing Site
Don’t get us wrong, LinkedIn can be a great tool for recruiters and hiring managers to use when sourcing employees, but it shouldn’t be the only source that recruiters turn to. Rather than exclusively trusting LinkedIn as your go-to recruiting platform, there are other methods that should be blending with utilizing this resource.

Using a recruitment firm is a great tool that saves hiring managers time when sourcing talent. In the logistics industry, CS Recruiting is one of the premier recruitment firms, with expert recruiters with broad networks throughout the logistics industry. Recruiters at agencies like these are authorities on finding the right fit for a company and are trained on how to find the best talent from a variety of resources.

Hiring managers can learn a lot more about what a candidate is about after five minutes of speaking on the phone instead of spending one minute skimming their LinkedIn profile. As a general rule of thumb, LinkedIn should rarely be the first place that a recruiter turns to source talent, but rather should be part of the candidate evaluation and research process.

For more information about how CS Recruiting can help you source the right talent for your company, visit our website today http://www.cs-recruiting.com/.