Hey, it's great to see you again.
If you are new here, my name is Bill Benoist.
I'm a certified professional career coach in Silicon Valley.
In today's video I'm going to show you how you can find recruiters using LinkedIn.
And not only that, I'm going to share with you some scripts as to how you can best reach
out and connect with these recruiters.
LinkedIn is a really powerful resource and this is just another way to use this great
tool.
So stay tuned.
So I don't want to just find any recruiter, I want to make this a little strategic.
So what I want to do first is I'm going to actually go to a job board.
Let's try Indeed.
It is already filled in and so here I am with Indeed and I want to find a position that
I would maybe want to apply for.
So finance director, let's try that.
Okay, it's auto filled and click on that.
I'm going to look for in California ... no actually I'm going to look in Sunnyville.
That's kind of the heart of Silicon Valley and we'll do find jobs.
So what I want to do is I want to find a position that is a senior position and I want to find
something that was posted fairly recently.
So a chief operations officer, I want finance.
Oh, there we go.
Right here.
Senior finance ... senior director of finance, Intuitive Surgical, Sunnyvale posted eight
days ago.
So this is a live position.
Okay, so we know that Intuitive Surgical has an opening for a senior director of finance.
You know, one of the things that I do is I would go ahead and click on this and I would
hit apply.
Okay.
It says apply on company website.
Let me just click on that and see where this takes me.
See, come on, speed up a little bit.
Speed up a little bit.
Here it goes.
Free Directing and fa la, la La.
Sorry about this.
Looks like their website ... okay, here it is.
Okay, so it looks like right there I can just hit apply in and keep going.
So I've applied on their company website.
They have my resume.
Now, what I want to do is I want to look for some recruiters out there that are internal
to Intuitive Surgical.
So this is how I'm going to do this.
I'm going to to close that, I've applied for the position.
I'm going to go to LinkedIn.
Now once a month on LinkedIn, I am going to go to the Intuitive LinkedIn page.
There they are, right there.
Intuitive company medical devices.
Clicking on this, I'm now on their LinkedIn page and you see ... see all 4,997 employees
on LinkedIn.
And I also know somebody that works here, so that's going to be advantageous also.
And I'll show you how I can leverage this person that I know.
But for right now I'm going to just simply click on this and I have 4,741 results.
I have a hunch, I don't know this for sure, but I have a hunch that Intuitive has several
campuses across the US.
I'm only interested in that finance director position, our director of finance in the Sunnyvale
location.
So I'm going to go over here to locations and then click on this.
And unfortunately I can't filter down to say Sunnyville but I can filter to the San Francisco
Bay area and that should be fine.
So you can click on this and I have cut it in half.
So sure enough there is multiple campuses out there.
I have 2,274.
So now what I want to do is I want to filter just simply to recruiters.
And this is really kind of the the core of this video but don't leave now because there's
a lot more to this.
But what I can do is I'm going to go over here to all filters and I'm going to scroll
down a little bit and you will see right here under name, first name, last name, we have
title.
Why is this important to know?
Let's say for example that that job description actually says ... maybe you were applying
for a software developer position and in the job description, and I often often see this,
it will say the title of who this position reports to.
So it may be this position reports to the chief technology officer or this position
reports to the chief financial officer.
But in this case we didn't have that.
But I want to look at the recruiters because I have a hunch the recruiters are going to
be the ones that are really, you know, looking hard at these resumes.
So I'm going to type in recruiter and I'm going to hit apply and that's it.
But we're not done yet.
Don't leave yet.
But you notice I just brought this down to 17 results.
So what do we do with this information?
Well first off I'm going to take a look at this and you notice that I have some second
connections here with a number of these people.
Here's a third connection.
It's not really as helpful as what I have with the second connections.
So I see Laurie here.
Laurie is somebody that I know quite well so I can leverage her and I will in just a
moment.
But for right now imagine that you don't have any second connections or first connections,
but you want to reach out and get on this recruiter's radar because you've just applied
for this position.
How would you do that?
Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on connect over here and always, always,
always add a personal note.
Okay?
You don't just click on send now because what they're going to do, you got these probably
many times where you know, Bill Benoist has sent you a LinkedIn connection requests.
No, you want to personalize this note.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click on add a note.
And if you notice, I only have 300 characters to play with, that's not 300 words, that's
300 characters.
So I have to, you know, really maximize my impact on this note.
So I'm going to personalize it and what am I going to do here is I'm going to actually
pause this video so you don't have to watch me create this note and then we'll come back
and, like magic, it'll be there.
So I'm going to go up here.
I'm going to click on this and I'm going to click on pod and boom, I'm back and it's just
like magic.
There is the personalized note.
Hi Zarina, I see you are a recruiter for Intuitive Surgical.
I was very excited to see the finance director position currently available with Intuitive
and although I have applied online, I would love to connect with you for any current or
future needs you may have for someone with my skills.
And guess what?
That was 296 characters because I still have four characters left, so I'm not going to
send this, but let me tell you why I want to do this.
A couple of different reasons.
Number one, according to a study by Glassdoor in 2017 the average position attracts about
250 resumes.
So Zarina is going to get either 250 resumes delivered to her or they're going into an
applicant tracking system and she's going to be looking at a whole bunch of resumes.
By sending a connection request, this does a couple of things for me.
Number one, this is going to hit her inbox, all right?
Here's a name coming out of thin air that is now in her inbox and that name is going
to be on her radar whenever she's looking through her 250 pile of resumes or looking
at the applicant tracking system.
But there's another reason, and I think this could be even more important.
Let's say ... oh, by the way, will Zarina accept my connection request?
The chances are better than 50/50, better than 50/50.
Why?
Because, number one, Zarina and all recruiters out there, they always need to have a bucket
of qualified candidates out there.
So even though you may not be a fit for this position, maybe they've already filled the
position, maybe they're in the final stages of an offer.
However, Zarina will still connect with you because she needs you in that bucket for anything
future.
So that's one of the reasons there why she will likely connect with you.
But let me explain to you why this is so important.
Let me take it to ... I'm going to go to another company right now.
So I'm going to click on, I'm going to close this for just a moment and I am going to ... imagine
for a moment that Zarina and you have connected or Zarina and I have connected in this case
here.
Now let's imagine that there's another medical device company out there.
In fact, I'm going to use Stryker.
I know Stryker is in Sunnyvale and there it is right there and they are medical device
companies.
So let me click on this.
Let's say that Stryker has an opening for a finance director.
You do not know of this opening.
Maybe the opening's not even been advertised yet, but you have this specific recruiter
that you don't know, that you're not connected to, is now going to go out onto LinkedIn ... and
this is what over 90% of recruiters do.
And they're going to search for qualified candidates out there.
So here I am a recruiter.
Oh, and by the way, I'm also directly connected with Zarina.
We're friends because we're in the industry together.
So I'm going out, I'm going to type in finance director and let's just say that ... let me
put this out there and go to people and there's 4 million people out there, but I'm going
to bring it down to location.
I'll say the United States or San Francisco Bay, excuse me, and I hit apply and it should
drop it down 114,000.
Let's say that I am looking for someone who has experience with mergers and acquisitions.
So I'm going to type in mergers here and let's ... okay, so you notice I just dropped it
down to 20,000.
Let's say that I am also interested in somebody who is familiar with medical devices, so I'm
going to type in medical devices.
Now that's kind of a stretch there.
I'm going to type in ... let's say that I want this finance director to know SalesForce.
All right, so just put SalesForce.
Look, I brought it down to 1700 quite a drop.
Now I want you to kind of notice something here.
You know who will come up first in my search?
It's going to be the individuals who have all of the keywords that I'm looking for,
which by the way, if you had mergers and you had SalesForce experience and this was listed
on your resume, you're coming up in this pool of things, but it's still 1700 individuals.
What's also brings you up on the first is if you were connected directly to this person.
Well you're not, you've never even heard of this person.
But guess who comes in second?
Your second connections.
That's right, your second connections.
And I've talked a lot about this before.
Your second connections are going to be more important to you in landing that position
than your first connections.
So by connecting with Zarina, not only are you getting on her radar, you're filling her
bucket of candidates for maybe the next time around, but you now connected by through second
connection to other recruiters that she may be connected to.
Pretty important, right?
We're not done yet.
Let me go back to something for just a moment and that was ... let me go back to, let me
go back to Zarina.
I'm going to just hit the back button a couple of times here.
Remember I talked about the importance of ... maybe I should have just come back here.
Hopefully this is going to be the last one.
Duh, Duh, Duh, Duh.
Okay, there we are.
So remember I told you about this first connection, Laurie.
So let me show you another way that I can actually leverage LinkedIn for this one recruiter.
So I'm going to go over here, I'm going to click on her name.
I'm not going to click on connect right now.
I'm going to Click on her name.
Now this is only going to work if you have the premium version of LinkedIn.
You notice this right here, this message.
The message is that it's actually, it's called an InMail.
And what it does, if you click on this, what this does is it allows me to actually send
a message to Zarina without connecting with her.
See if I wanted to communicate with Zarina right now and I did not have the premium,
only had the free version, I would have to connect with her.
But if I had the premium version, I can actually use an InMail.
And I believe the premium version gives you three in InMails a month.
It used to be five.
It's always changing.
I hesitate to actually, you know, say how many you get, but you get a limited supply
of InMail messages.
But what's the advantage of this?
Well, again, I'm going to pause this video for a second and I'm going to put in a personalized
message and you will see.
So I'm going up here and clicking on this and I'm going to say pause and, just like
magic, I'll be back in a matter of a second.
Okay.
I'm back.
And I had this customized InMail filled out.
No, you don't have to follow my content exactly.
I think you kind of get the drift is to how we can use the InMail.
So in this case here, I've sent a personalized message, not a connection request, to Zarina.
Hi Zarina.
I saw the finance director position posted with Intuitive and although I have applied
online, I wanted to drop you this brief note.
I noticed we have a mutual LinkedIn connection with Laurie.
I didn't put her last name there, but Laurie is actually my neighbor and speaks very highly
of Intuitive.
I recognize the hiring process is risky when you know nothing about the applicant and although
I have not worked closely with Laurie, I do believe she can speak well to my character.
If my qualifications and skills meet what you are looking for, I would be honored to
explore this opportunity further with you and your convenience.
Why is this important?
Think about this.
You're a hiring manager or you're a recruiter and you've received 250 resumes for this one
opening and then from the left hand side comes this email with a person's name, that person
that you can actually go to, get up out of your chair and go over and walk over to their
office and knock on the door and say, "Excuse me, but do you have a moment?
I just received this message and I want to ask you about this."
And this is very powerful.
I can tell you as a hiring manager, I mean anybody that referred someone to me, no matter
how many resumes I got, that would actually come to the front of the line.
So again, looking for recruiters using, you know, this method.
And one final thing out there, you know, you can just do a search for recruiters using
the title.
Let me just go back.
I'm going to show you one final thing here.
Go back to this, I'll say discard, and I'm going to go back to my home screen and let's
just go to search.
And I will ... I'm going to just type in executive search.
I put that in there.
People.
And look at what we have here.
So we can just do a whole bunch of ... and these are usually going to be third party,
although you see a few of them, you know, Facebook, Dropbox there.
But this is another way where you can search for recruiters.
So people never really use this, you know, or when they do, they're just searching for
a person's name out there.
But you can use this to search for company names and titles and anything else.
And then using all filters over here really breaks things down as well as making sure
that you break down from the location.
So I hope you found this video informative and useful.
And if so, make sure that you subscribe to this channel, hit the bell notification.
That way you're not going to miss anything moving forward as I do upload new career tips
and strategies every Tuesday.
Thanks for stopping by and I will see you in the next video.