How to: Find and Follow your LinkedIn Connections on Twitter
As social recruiting becomes more and more to the fore, we’re getting on Twitter. Twitter integration with LinkedIn is nothing new (it’s been around for about 2 years now), but it’s surprising how overlooked this option to integrate your Twitter and LinkedIn connections together still remains.
Your LinkedIn connections may be more influential in their Twitter space, sharing articles and blogs of industry importance and innovation that can mean you stay with the curve of progression when it comes to social recruiting. Also, the people you’re connected with in LinkedIn you may not be following on Twitter, so here’s a really easy way to update your follows.
Here’s how to integrate your LinkedIn and Twitter connections:
Firstly, click here to install the Tweets application to your LinkedIn profile.
Once that’s up, then click in to the More tab at the top of your profile, and click on Tweets.
When you’re inside your settings on Tweets, you’ll be given an overview of your Twitter feed, who you follow, and what Lists you have. Now, Lists are actually quite important. If you characterize people under Lists (but bear in mind, they can see the name of that list, so DO NOT call them things like “Prospect” or “Dud-prospect”…) you can easily organize your connections, particularly if there are connections on Twitter whose Tweets you don’t want to overlook.
You can have up to 20 lists, and up to 500 people per list. Based on your LinkedIn connections, LinkedIn will suggest connections for you to follow (down a bit on the left hand side) and click on “All connections on Twitter”. This will show you all of your LinkedIn connections who have Twitter accounts listed in their profiles, and you can directly follow them on Twitter without having to leave LinkedIn. LinkedIn will also categorize your new follows in to a List (generically called LinkedIn connections, but you can change it to whatever you’d like).
So, really easy, and one more way to get social with LinkedIn. If you’re relatively new to Twitter (which many of you would be, Twitter gained more than 250,000 members in Ireland this year alone and is therefore the fastest growing social network in the country) you can have your Twitter stream inside your LinkedIn stream as one, without needing to go through multiple social networks to get your news.
Have you integrated your Twitter in to LinkedIn? Have you found it useful? Tell us in the comments.
And if you’d like, you can follow us on Twitter! Click here to follow me (@HollyFawcett), here to follow Nicola (@MsNickyMac), here to follow Oliver (@OliSkehan) and here to follow Jonathan (@Recruiterblog).
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How to go from 40 to 4,000 LinkedIn contacts in 4 hours
LinkedIn is the largest CV database in the world with over 120 million global profiles including over 7.5 million in the UK (24% of the available workforce), 520,000 in Ireland, 4.6m in Canada, 2.5 million in Australia and 630,000 in Singapore. If you are an in-house corporate recruiter you can purchase this entire database (or at least the ability to search it and see everyone’s name and profile) for anything between US$2.5k and ¢8k per user per year. However, if you are an agency recruiter or a corporate recruiter without that sort of budget, the best you can hope for is the ability to see the full names of your first, second and third degree connections leaving you scrambling to build your contact list to see the rest. If you are lucky enough to ever reach LinkedIn’s current ceiling of 30,000 contacts, you still probably won’t be able to see everyone, unless that is you have completed our Blue Belt in Internet Recruitment course where we show you how to see everyone’s full name with only one contact, even on a free account!
Three degrees of separation still shows you a lot of profiles so how does the average recruiter start building their contacts quickly? How can you get from 40 or 400 to 4,000 quality connections in a short period of time?
The one thing that nearly every recruiter has in common is that we typically have access to some sort of database of contacts. They may be previous applicants, CVs from the old days when people used to actually apply to jobs on job boards, or it might be a spreadsheet listing people you have interviewed over the years. Even a small agency typically has an applicant tracking system or recruitment database (call it what you may!) stuffed full of several thousand contacts. It never ceases to amaze me that these same recruiters are still struggling to reach the illusive 500+ connections when they are sitting on so much candidate data.
Here’s my golden rule when it comes to hyperlinks on LinkedIn: the smaller the print, chances are the more useful the application and this has never been more true than when it comes to adding contacts. Did you know that you can upload all of the contacts from your database or Excel spreadsheet and LinkedIn will tell you which of those people have a LinkedIn profile? What if I then told you that you could send an invite to these same people, in bulk, with several simple mouse clicks? You can literally upload and cross references thousands of email addresses and send out invites to connect in minutes. All you need to do then is sit back and watch your number of connections explode!
Have I got your attention? Good? Let’s grow your connection base.
Step 1: You will need a list of e-mail addresses in an Excel spreadsheet. It doesn’t matter if you have 30 other columns or just one as long as there is at least one column full of email addresses. Nearly all CRM packages and databases support the ability to export candidate or client details. If you don’t have permission then chances are that your manager does or your software vendor can perform a data dump. I’ll deal with the question of why you should consider opening up this data to your recruiters later in this post.
Step 2: You need to save your Excel spreadsheet as a CSV (Comma Separated Values) file. If your data already comes in a file that ends in .csv then skip ahead to the next Step. From within Excel click on “File”, “Save As” and change the file format to “Comma Separated Values”. Hit save, making sure you save the folder somewhere you can remember such as your Documents or Desktop. Make sure that your email data is on the first Work Sheet as CSV files don’t support multiples sheets, hence they wont save anything past the first sheet. If you don’t have a clue what I am talking about, you probably only have one Sheet so just plough on!
Step 3: From anywhere within LinkedIn, click on the “Contacts” tab near the top. It’s the third one from the left. Now click on the “Add Connections” drop-down that will appear immediately below this tab.
Step 4: A light blue box will dominate your screen. In the bottom left of that box you will see a line of black text that says “Do you use Outlook, Apple Mail or another email application?”. Just below that in small print (see, I love the small print) a clickable link entitled “Import your desktop email contacts”. Click on it.
Step 5: A new window will open that begins “Import your Desktop Email Contacts”; click “Choose File” and go find that little CSV file you saved in Step 2. Once the dialogue window closes, click “Upload File”.
Step 6: If you are not immediately brought to a new window showing all of the connections you just imported, do not despair, it’s probably because your list is very large and will take a couple of minutes for LinkedIn to process. Just go back to Contacts and click on “Connections”. You will see four tabs along the top beginning with “Connections” and followed by “Imported Contacts”, “Profile Organizer” and “Network Statistics”. Click on the tab entitled “Imported Contacts”, second from the left.
Step 7: Your Imported Contacts page shows all of your imported contacts in alphabetical order, grouping contacts by letter, beginning with A. To access the “B’s”, “C’s”, “D’s” etc you just need to click on the individual letters to the left. All of your contact names that are highlighted in black CANNOT be cross-referenced on LinkedIn. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t have a LinkedIn account, it just means that they don’t have that exact email address registered against their account. All of the names that are highlighted in Blue and that display the blue “in” icon to the right of the name are definitely on LinkedIn. We recommend that you begin by adding contacts that are definitely on LinkedIn, i.e. the “blue” contacts. You will need to manually select the tick-box to the left of their names. Unfortunately you will need to manually click on every single contact that you want to invite, scrolling through up to 27 pages of results (there is a # page for names beginning with a number or a special character). Whilst there is a “Select All” option at the top of each page, it will also select the people who aren’t registered on LinkedIn with that email address. If you send it to these people then it literally just sends them a request to that email address asking them if they would like to join LinkedIn and connect with you. We’re not big fans of this.
Step 8. When you have hand-picked all of the contacts you want to connect with you simply click the “Invite Selected Contacts” button to the right hand side of your screen. That’s it. You’re done!
So, the only question left to answer is why a company or agency would allow their staff to use the company’s private applicant or candidate data to expand the employee’s personal connections on LinkedIn? There are valid points to be made on both sides of the argument but my take on it is this: a socially connected recruiter is a better recruiter. If you are serious about attracting great talent then you need to empower your recruiters with all the right tools and contact data is essential to doing that. In return I suggest that employers ask that their recruiters share their own contacts with the organisation every couple of months by exporting their connections from LinkedIn (easy to do) and handing over the file. It’s a two way street after all. That way both parties have “skin in the game” and their is an element of trust built into the deal.
NB, LinkedIn allow you to invite approx 3,000 contacts before requiring you to know everyone’s email address in advance. You can get blocked before 3,000 but inviting LinkedIn members using the method above does reduce your available requests so use them wisely! You can keep adding contacts this way, even past 3,000 but the next time you find an old colleague on LinkedIn and try to add them you will need to enter a valid email address before the invite will be sent. You have been cautioned!
This tip was one of many shared at Social Talent’s LinkingIn for Recruiters breakfast briefing hosted by APSCO in London earlier this week. We will be running another APSCO hosted Breakfast Briefing on Tuesday 4th October in 2011; there are a limited number of places available here.
Our NRF & APSCO Breakfast Briefings contain material from our Orange Belt in Internet Recruitment course.
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“I don’t want that job!” The Importance of Employer Branding
You’d think in this day and age, with our unemployment rate at an alarming 14.5% and morale still diving, that when an employer sets up a new business and looks for staff, offering jobs with a decent wage to people who may not have much experience in that industry, people would jump at the chance, writes Oliver Skehan
Well, it seems, as I always suspected, that things are not black and white but more often than not grey, grey, grey. On Monday morning, the radio was on in the office and Late Late Show anchor Ryan Tubridy was speaking to John Aylward, MD of ARE Direct Sales Management based in southern Ireland in Co. Tipperary.
After sourcing CVs through the FAS website, which was his first mistake – FAS lies in 91st position in sites visited in Ireland – There were 15 jobs on offer. Aylward called 72 to interview at his office based in Thurles. 18 turned up. Of that number, 10 were offered jobs. Seven, yes seven, showed up for work. Of the three that abstained, one was offered another post while the other two implied that they had weighed up what they were receiving on social welfare and decided to give full-time work a miss.
All 10 jobs were as Sales Reps with a basic salary of €21,000.
So what went wrong? Does it sound the death knell for employers’ hopes of hiring staff in an ‘employers market’?
Are unemployed people reluctant to come off the dole? Many will argue that being on social welfare is too cosy, and that there is no real incentive to get back to work.
“We really need to look at what people receive on the Live Register,” an exasperated Aylward said. “It is really frustrating.”
The social welfare package for someone unemployed per week is €188, plus rent allowance, child benefit, back-to-school allowance, single parent allowance etc.
We’ve heard reports from commentators on this subject that to make it really feasible to turn their back on the handout from the State and accept a job that they’d have to be offered a role paying more than €30,000 to make it worthwhile.
To most people, just the act of working and having a job is enough to get them off the dole, that it’s the last place they’d rather stay and the first opportunity of a job will be taken. The social welfare system is there as a support network for in-between jobs.
But perhaps there was something more about how the company in question went about its recruitment process, and maybe it was in fact all their fault and not the apparent unwillingness for people to accept jobs.
Founded in 2010, ARE Direct Sales Management’s description on Facebook states: “We operate and manage a number of field based sales teams for a number of major companies within Ireland. We have the experience, skills and manpower to grow sales for any and all markets. Specializing (sic) in utility sales and contract services.” What on earth is that?
Prior to Monday the last post on their Facebook page was on September 8. In it Danny Carty wanted to know ‘whos your daddy’. 
Worryingly, the next post – a link to a story in Monday’s Irish Independent entitled ‘Businesses struggle to find Irish staff despite jobs crisis’ caught Siobhan O’Brien’s eye.
Siobhan did receive a response but at the end of it she was urged to ‘call 050422356 during office hours’ to find out more. We must ask, who rings an office anymore? I spent the first two days in this office wondering if there was a phone here at all. Phoning the office is the last port of call for about 99% of people with internet access. Where do people go first? Google. They find you on Facebook. They research your company, the role, people who may work there, long before they make any personal contact with an employee of that organisation. In this instance, DSM Ltd have a typical Irish SME attitude to Social Media. They’re on Facebook, but only barely and probably to pay it lip service. Their website is incomplete and does not offer prospective employees enough information about both the roles available and the company itself. Of course no one came to the interview. They have no employer brand.
An employer brand is about giving an employee a reason to come to work. You make public your strategy for employees and also what you do. Facebook as an employer brand tool is completely free and is often the first port of call for applicants to investigate you and your business. Do I really want to work for this organisation? With no employer brand it’s no surprise that so few candidates accepted roles that they were offered.
How do you represent your employer brand in your business? Without it, do you think you’d be as successful?
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There’s something about #Ireland What is it?
Yet another massive global tech giant is to open in Dublin, as Twitter follow the likes of Google, Facebook and LinkedIn, writes Oliver SkehanGoogle did it. Facebook did it. LinkedIn did it. PayPal did it. eBay did it. The precedent was set. It was only a matter of time before Twitter arrived in the ‘Internet Capital of Europe’, wasn’t it?
Yes, Dublin, the city widely associated with the ‘rare auld times’ is where social media companies turn their attention when they are looking to establish a European headquarters.
Google set up in Dublin seven years ago and now employs 2,200 having started off with 200. Facebook will employ around 300 by the end of 2012 while LinkedIn will employ 140. PayPal currently employ 1,300 while eBay employ about 1,000 at present. Games maker, Zynga, have also recently set up shop, employing around 100 staff.
The tweet ‘Ireland is trending. Twitter to establish international office in Dublin’ was inevitable. Or was it? On Monday, a spokeswoman for Twitter, said: “The Twitter office in Dublin, our third location outside of the US, is a great next step in the company’s global expansion.” Positive words for sure.
Yes, Ireland is attractive to multinationals for a number of reasons; access to talent, ease of business, a dynamic digital media cluster and crucially a 12.5% corporate tax rate and tax law that allows profit to be sent from the country on to tax havens – the dangling carrot to beat all dangling carrots.
But these announcements don’t just happen. A lot of hard work is done behind the scenes. At one stage it looked as if Twitter were going to choose London over Ireland but the IDA’s commendable determination paid off and chief executive, Barry O’Leary, said: “Twitter is a fantastic addition to Ireland’s dynamic digital media cluster and we are excited to support the company’s continued international growth.”
Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Richard Bruton, added: “Twitter is one of the most exciting and fastest-growing companies in the world.
“The challenge now is to build on our strengths and the presence in Ireland of the world-leading companies like Twitter to build an indigenous engine of growth and get people back to work.”
So are there real grounds for optimism or is the Minister all ‘TalkTalk‘? Is anyone really listening to the Minister? And who exactly is getting back to work?
It is expected that Twitter will follow the lead of its American counterpart Google and initially employ staff in the fields of finance, user support and marketing. The question is will those staff be from the motherland? Does it matter? Of Google’s current staff, 70% are foreign nationals. Does that matter? Not in the slightest.
If the make-up of Twitter’s new set-up is completely non-Irish then that’s fine. Jobs for Ireland is what its all about. They don’t necessarily have to be jobs for Irish people. There’s a bigger picture.
Here’s the way it will flow. Foreign national gets job. Foreign national rents apartment or buys house. Foreign national buys car. Foreign national gives the struggling retail sector a boost. Foreign national boosts the Irish company. Simple.
That money can then be used to give the aforementioned retail sector a leg-up, not to mention the sector the ‘Celtic Tiger’ was built on: construction. There is something about Ireland. It’s not the weather. It’s something else. What is it?
Tell us in the comments!
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