Chris Villanueva 01:46 
Alright, Michael, how are you doing today?

I love that so much. And the theme I think that we can’t hammer home enough is quality over quantity of connections. I mean, I’m nowhere near 17,000. I think I’m like 4,000 or something right now, but even then I’m noticing that the more I add people, because there’s been a certain point where I just decide to accept everyone because I just want more. I was surprised by how much that didn’t help me within my professional life or my career just because I had more connections than I did last year. So I’m really starting to do the same thing, which is look and really filter out who I think I’m going to put the effort into being in touch with and connecting with. Because it’s annoying when you add all these people and your entire feed just becomes unusable because it’s just anything and everything. And so when you have a good feed that has things you can actually comment on things, you can actually, I think that has made a big difference for me.

Yeah, I mean I think you can weed it. So when I go through this, I’m also looking at the data. So I’m looking at the type of position that they hold for you and i’s purposes as service providers. I want to talk with decision makers. I want to build the relationships with them on the candidate side. When I am coached, I do coach candidates on job search strategy, those candidates, but I know that those candidates will eventually become employed and then eventually they hopefully become clients. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I’ve noticed on my LinkedIn request over the last probably week, I have ignored 70% of the connection requests that have come in because they’re a part of Fiverr. So they want your business.

I help people with financial services. I ignore those requests and you can put it out there to, Hey, stop doing that, build a relationship here. You could always have that post out there, but I would say I’m choosing to be more selective. And I remember in the beginning of LinkedIn, I’ve been on LinkedIn since 2000. It’s either 2004 or 2006, I can’t remember when it was, but the old theory was never turn down a connection request. You never know where it can lead. True. But if I’m doing business here in the United States and I’m getting 80% of my request overseas, and you have to be very careful, I’m starting to now get spam and phishing requests on there. So yeah, so that to me is it’s be selective and have the quality, but use the data you have because you can export your data on LinkedIn. As a recruiter, I would recommend you look at that data and look at the people in your network. Are they related to the types of positions that you recruit in your current position? And if not, they don’t need to be a connection.

That’s a good segue because a lot of the people listening to this podcast are job seekers who are curious about how recruiters are using LinkedIn to find candidates. Let’s just turn the attention to you just for a second. How are you using LinkedIn to find quality candidates? What does your process look like?

So I take a couple of different approaches to it. I do have navigator. I do not have a LinkedIn recruiter receipt. It’s very expensive, 7,500 to 9,000 depending on the company and what they’re feeling that day. I use LinkedIn to recruit through sales navigator, but I also tend to use Google by x-raying LinkedIn to get my candidates, and I do this for several reasons. The most important reason being LinkedIn is changing their algorithms daily and you never know what you’re going to get. Here’s a good example, and also there tends to be a finite amount of results that they’ll produce to you when you go out on LinkedIn. I could do a LinkedIn search and get more results of people and connect with them that way. Now, if I want to talk to a candidate, I don’t send a connection request. Basically what I do is if they look interesting to me, I’m going to send them a very personalized LinkedIn email. I’m going to note the company that they work for, I’m going to put their company name in the subject line, the company that they currently work for, if they’re unemployed, I’m going to put their name and their title.

Last title helped. And what I always do is I always include the number of years that they’ve worked for a company. Hey Chris, I see you’ve been with, let’s see, Graham off for the last five years and notice that you’re a resume writer or see that you have strong resume writing skills. We’d love to talk to you about an opportunity with this publishing company to whatever. It’s about personalization. Recruiters make the mistake of sending out mass emails or mass InMail messages, whether through navigator or through LinkedIn, a recruiter, and it’s not personalized and it’s not about saying, Hey, it’s not about opening about, Hey, I’ve got a job for you. Hey Chris, I’ve seen your success. Let’s see, grandma, I’ve seen some examples of your work on your LinkedIn profile. I really liked it. Butter them up a little bit, right? Look at it. It’s hard to go cliche, but it is like dating. You got to build that relationship first before you ask them out on a date and say, Hey, let’s get married.

Absolutely.

Take it slowly and don’t put use email. You can use email campaigns through a variety of different tools that are out there, but make those emails very, very personalized.

Absolutely.

Correct. So I did a post today on LinkedIn this morning. I did my first post about treating your, it says treat your candidates and then it says customers, but there’s a line drawn through candidates. It says, treat your candidates like customers, and that’s big. So I talk about the importance of giving them thinking globally. So as a recruiter, don’t just look at, just because they applied to one position doesn’t mean they’re not qualified for another position in your company. So in that, I compare it to, Hey, if you’re interested in this, you should check out this. It’s kind of like the, we’ll call out Amazon, it’s like the Amazon approach. They always have suggestions to what else you should be considering. I talk about keeping in touch with your candidates to keep them informed of the status. So you know how when you order from somewhere, they’ll send you updates and email automated, say, Hey, your package is on its way or your package is arrived. Let your recruiters know or let your candidates know that you’re thinking about them and have candidate touch points throughout.

And why do we do that? It’s help allow that candidate to make an informed decision about whether or not they’re qualified for the position, have done the responsibilities, and then compel them to apply.

Absolutely. I want to flip it over back to the job seeker. Now, I like this little dance we’re doing because this is a relationship. People need to see it from the side of recruiters, but let’s draw the connection here to the job seeker. What are the top things you’re actually looking for when you’re trying to find that quality candidate? What are you doing specifically with looking at the profile? Are you looking at every word? What’s the job search process there?

It’s just like the resume you got about on the LinkedIn profile, you probably got about five to 10 seconds of the recruiter’s attention. So you really need a strong headline. And I always like to read the about section because that tells me about their communication style. Have they taken the time to really put what they do and tell me about themselves? I mean, yeah, I’ll look at their experience. I’ll glance at that experience. I don’t read every single word because remember the LinkedIn profile is more like a marketing document, so it’s not going to go into as much detail as the resume in terms of the bullet points and the skills and all that. Well, the skills are on their LinkedIn resume, but you want to make sure that that about section your experience have the keywords that are related to the general terms that are applicable to that specific position that you’re in,

That you’re applying for. How long or short should that about section be? How long is yours?

Four short paragraphs. But the other thing I do is I put something personal about me so I can find a common connection with me, and that’s a way to get to the person. They can look at my profile and say, oh, you went to the University of Georgia. I went to Florida. Georgia sucks. They can do that, right? I see you’re an avid Red Sox fan. Oh, I hate the Red Sox. I love the Yankees. Right? It’s something where you can start to have more casual conversation, put the person at ease. The other thing that jobs seekers can do is in their skillset, but you have to be careful because you don’t want to put a skillset you only did once. You want to have skills in there that people are going to recommend you for, right? So if you look at mine, you’re going to see recruiting leadership, talent management, talent acquisition. I mean all the skills related to what I do are in my skill section. So if a recruiter wants to find me, there’s no way they can’t find me because I’ve got skills that I’ve got people backing me up on

What I do. If you do a skill once, it doesn’t count, don’t list that skillset

And I’ll ask the same question in regards to length and how much to actually include within that aspect of your profile. But how many skills should I seek to include? Should it be like a shotgun with everything I’ve done or should I focus on a few key skills? What do you think?

It should match your profile and resume? So if you’ve done that skill and you are truly skilled at that list, if you’ve done it once, don’t list it. If you’ve never done it and you want to do it, don’t list it because you don’t have the skill yet. You haven’t put it into practice.

I love that and I’ve gotten that question before because job seekers,

There’s no number.

Yeah, they’re coming up with their profiles and they’re afraid that they’re not going to have enough or some are afraid that they’re putting too much. So you’re just saying speak true to your skills. That’s the answer. Don’t worry about anything else.

Exactly.

I want to round it out here before I get your final words of advice, but the question I wanted to ask you was what do you think are the top two mistakes that job seekers are making with their LinkedIn profiles or how they’re treating LinkedIn?

The biggest mistakes I’ve seen is either are too short, it’s not enough information. That’s probably the number one mistake is their about section is literally one or two sentence, the two most important words on a LinkedIn profile. Do you know what that is?

You’ll have to tell me.

See more. You know what I’m talking about, the see more button.

See more about section.

About section, your experience section on your posts. Because What does that do? It creates a cliffhanger. So I’m more compelled to click see more to see what’s going on.

I’ve never thought about it. You’d be the first person to tell me that.

Two most important words see more because you want to compel the person to see what kind of experience you have, right? So that’s first.

Okay. I love that. No one has ever told me that before, including enough information. You think a lot of job seekers are making the mistake of just not including enough. What’s another mistake?

They’re regurgitating their resume on LinkedIn. They’re basically taking it and copying it, copying and pasting their resume to their LinkedIn profile. Nobody has time to read all that. Plus the bullets don’t format over very well, right? So use icons. Don’t be afraid to use some icons in your about section or your like at the bottom of my about section, I’ll use the telephone icon. I’ll use the email icon. I’ll use the website icon to put that information. Put your contact information. That’s probably another mistake. Job seekers, make it hard to get ahold of them. Put your personal email, don’t put your business email. Put your personal email in there, especially if you’re not working, working your personal email. If you’re comfortable, put your phone number. If you have a website that shows examples of your work, like if you’re a designer or you’re a creative type, have examples of your work either on your LinkedIn profile or create a WordPress site that has all examples of your work and refer the people to it so that they don’t have to ask for it.

Michael, I love this. This is very practical advice for job seekers and I think very encouraging. So thank you for being a fantastic guest for the show. I got to ask, one of my favorite questions to leave listeners with is if you could tattoo one encouraging message for every career warrior applying for a job, what would that message be?

Consistent. Be consistent. Show up every day. Show up every day on LinkedIn network every day. Never stop networking Just because people aren’t calling you back, that means that the next person may call you back. Don’t get discouraged and focus on the good things. Set goals for yourself for the week each week. Set goals for yourself and make sure you’re hitting them. Don’t just spend all your time looking for jobs on the internet and applying for jobs online that doesn’t work anymore. It’s about networking to find your job these days.

Thank you so much, Michael. You’ve been a great guest for the show. I got to ask how can people stay in touch with you and what are you up to next?

They can find me. Go to my website at www.hiringtransform.com They can hit me up on my LinkedIn profile, suggest all those listening to Please connect with me, let me know what I can do to help. And my phone number is on my profile. All the contact information is on my LinkedIn profile, right?

Practice what you preach.