Recruiters – Use LinkedIn Responsibly

I was recently talking to a friend who has taken a career break.  He was in a fairly high profile role and has sought after experience, so I asked him if the head-hunters had started circling given his new “out of work” status.  He said that was now receiving a lot of approaches via LinkedIn even though he's not actively looking, but in fact he was always hassled by recruiters through that medium when in work.

This made me think, should there be a code of practice for recruiters using LinkedIn?  Here’s a few do’s and don’ts that I work to personally:

·         Do use InMail to approach relevant potential candidates, make your message polite and professional and link them to the role for consideration

·         Do be as open as you can, tell them about the client, role, salary etc – there’s no need for mystery

·         Do talk to the candidate and conduct thorough screening as you would normally, make sure you aren’t wasting the candidate’s and client’s time with a mismatch

·         Do offer to connect even if the person isn’t a candidate at this time, they could be a candidate in future

·         Don’t pester people once they have made it clear that they are not a candidate at this time, take “no” as “no”

·         Don’t take a blitz approach to building volume connections, keep your connection base relevant

·         Don’t approach people who have clearly set their status as not interested in contact from recruiters

·         Don’t post bland “click bait” articles, try to keep it interesting.  Do we need more posts about how the author was once treated by their boss and what they did next?

A few thoughts that just scratch the surface; I’d be interested to hear about your experiences on LinkedIn.