Hands up if you have still managed to resist the need to pay for Premium LinkedIn products? Assuming that most of the readers of this post will be HR or Recruiter types of some shape or form (and also perhaps my Mum. Hi Mum.) I wouldn’t expect many hands, in this day and age of commercialised, share market floated, LinkedIn.
If you’re a full-time professional recruiter, or recruitment forms a large part of your day to day activities, then using LinkedIn without a Premium subscription is a bit like trying to pass a driving test while blindfolded with white noise blaring from the stereo. It’s pretty much useless. Yet, being a recruiter of recruiters, and partial to browsing the odd recruiter profile or ten, it amazes me how many basic profiles I still see out there, in New Zealand anyway…
LinkedIn have, of course, cottoned on to this. So the below screenshot is doubtless something encountered by many kiwi recruiters these days:
Too many searches for profiles and the beer goggles kick in like a 3am cocktail and you get the message “Want unlimited searches? Give LinkedIn Premium a try…” Ooooh LinkedIn you tease! Click on Learn more and LinkedIn will inform you that,
“commercial use limit means your activity on LinkedIn is likely geared towards commercial purposes, like hiring or prospecting.”
Whilst I’m of the opinion that any full-time recruiter out there should be managing up to their boss and having a serious word if they’re too stingy to fork out 50 bucks or so a month for a Premium account, I’m also fully aware that there is an increasing amount of part-time and flexible workers within the recruitment community too, not least of who form part of our own vRPO on-demand recruiter community, and realise that this won’t always be so attainable.
So, for the part-timers, the flex workers, the freeloaders and the downtrodden…here are some useful LinkedIn hacks to look into:
Recruitin.net – a beautifully simple tool that asks you what you’re looking to find, and works out the complicated Google X-Ray search strings for you, presenting (full) public profiles to you in a Google search as opposed to limited or pared back ones within LinkedIn. Also searches profiles within places like GitHub and Stack Overflow now too, which is mana from heaven for IT Recruiters.
Prophet – an extension you can plug into your Chrome browser that means, when you’re on the public profile you found via your Google X-Ray search, you can click a button that will extract an email address. So the fact you don’t have InMail allocations can be side stepped too.
Rapportive – a tool actually owned by LinkedIn that means Gmail users can search their contacts and reveal LinkedIn profiles, even if you’re not connected.
Have fun playing around with these. There’s plenty more out there too and I’d welcome other suggestions in Comments below. But really, if you’re a salaried recruiter working full-time, just have a word with the Big Cheese and get a Premium account, I’m sure you’ll manage to get decent ROI!
Have a great long ANZAC weekend everyone.
