As recruiters, you will find that LinkedIn is one of the most important tools you have in your arsenal these days, especially if you are playing in the semi-professional up space, as most people you want to talk to will have a LinkedIn account. Thats all good, but how do you use it.

Well if you are like the majority of people I see (lazy), you will send an invite like this one (I have removed the name and picture of the person to protect their identity).

As you can see, the person who wanted to connect with me, made no effort whatsoever to customise the invite, so why would  take it seriously. I already have over 1000 people I am connected to and many of them are self professed marketing gurus. So why would I need to connect with another one. I did though, and purely for this post. I wanted to see if they did everything wrong and lucky for me, they did.

Within 10 minutes of accepting the invite, I received the following message

As you can see, there is no fact finding there, nothing to entice me, nothing to make me think that this is the 1 out of 100 of these I get each week, that I should read. So as a recruiter, what are you going to do to distance yourself from all the white noise (white noise is annoying static) that the recruitment industry creates on LinkedIn? How are you going to differentiate yourself?

Lest go back to our example above. Within 10 minutes of receiving the message on LinkedIn, I received exactly the same message via email. WHY????? I know, lets send the same message twice just to reinforce the point. Seriously (he says shaking his head)

The outcome. Well I would like to say that I spoke to this young lady and all is great, but I sent the following message back and disconnected from her. I OR YOU DO NOT NEED PEOPLE BEING ABLE TO GET ACCESS TO MY FIRST CONNECTIONS.

So how do you do it. Well below is an invite I sent to someone just yesterday. Can you see the difference? Take some time and you will get a much better result.

 

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