Finding the Right People - Part A Searching LinkedIn

As I said in the introduction, you can only hire people that apply for the job. Most managers will go to HR to create a job posting and wait for the resumes to come in. But I suggest you also act as your own recruiter. To be clear I am not suggesting you bypass the HR or 3rd party recruiters. Those professionals know what they are doing and in my experience, they do it very well. But there is a segment that they miss. The people that can be sold on your position by speaking with the hiring manager directly. (Engineers are in sales too, remember)

Part B of finding the right people will question who you want to interview and challenge you to expand your search criteria intentionally.

I developed an approach to finding people we might be interested in by searching LinkedIn and asking people to apply to the position. It takes some time and commitment to do it correctly but I have found it to be successful. The last time I had a position to fill, I spent about 4 hours total and was able to get 8 people that would not have applied. They either were not looking or not looking for a job at my company. Of those 8, 6 were very good interviews, and 3 were in the top 5 in our rankings. We hired one for the position and a few months later had another open position and hired one of the others. There were also 3 that were hired by other companies before we could arrange the interview.

So without any more rambling, the Process.

LinkedIn has a lot of really great search functionality built in, even without buying the little gold square. You can narrow down on the kind of experience, education, location, and quite a few other factors.

Step 1: Develop the search criteria that gives me the results I am looking for .Some trial and error is necessary. Start with geography and education, then look at keywords or possibly companies till you start seeing profiles you like.

Step 2: You will get a lot of results, like several thousand if you have the criteria correct. I just scan the profile previews LinkedIn gives you. If someone looks interesting, right click and open their profile in a new tab and keep scanning.

Step 3: Once I get a bunch of new tabs open, I will read the profile in detail to see if I want to talk to that person. The vast majority I close without contacting and go back to scanning.

Step 4: Send a connection request with a message short message. The wording is very important, it took me some trial and error to get a message that has a good response rate. Below is sample text of a message I have sent. I have bolded what I think are key to getting a response. Feel free to copy and adapt for you own use.

This message needs to be short as there is a character limit unless you pay to send a longer message. In today's world with head hunters and HR middlemen I have found people like engaging directly with the person doing the hiring. For efficiency I type out my first message in a word document and paste and send it.

Step 5: If they accept the connection request I send them a longer message. Again from trial and error I came up with a format that works, the format conveys I am the hiring manager, I am looking for them, sales pitch for the job, link to actual posting (so they know this is real), pitch for my company, and an invite. Sample text below; feel free to adapt for your own needs.

I want to let you know up front that I am not a headhunter/recruiter. I am the hiring manager. I am looking to fill a mechanical engineering position reporting to me. This position would primarily be responsible for design work for a variety of products. I saw your experience and thought that you might be a fit for what I am looking for. The mechanical group is the product owners. This would allow you to have input on all aspects of the product. We have support from very sophisticated hydraulic engineers, electrical engineers, and software engineers, but we also have a lot of input into these areas. Our primary responsibility is designing the complete mechanical system. The job posting can be found at: [link to post] A short blurb on the company: [company name] is an industry leader who supplies most of the equipment used in drilling oil & gas wells. We have a great benefits package, and there are a lot of opportunities for growth within the company. Let me know if you would like to speak further about this opportunity. Thanks so much for your time. If you are interested in this opportunity, please send me your resume to [your email address] and I will set up a 5 minute phone conversation

Step 6: Set up a phone call for about 5 minutes, give them pitch for the job, ask them what they think about the job, and what about the job interests them most. From here I can filter a lot of people out and not waste time on the interview process. It is surprising how much you can learn from just the first 5 minutes.

And 7 and 8 pull them into your normal hiring process.