You have a bunch of LinkedIn profiles, all from candidates who’ve applied for the role, and you need to find the best fit from them. How do you approach this scenario?
LinkedIn is a great place to look for potential recruits. However, to do so you must know how to screen and identify the best candidates. In case you’re unfamiliar with this approach, here’s a 6 step guide on how to identify the best job candidates on LinkedIn.
Step 1: Looking at their educational background
One quick look at their educational background will give you a good idea as to what you’re dealing with. If the college or university they’re studying in is unfamiliar to you, you can simply check the English program on their website, and get some ideas from there. By taking their university programs, as well as grades into account, you can at least filter which candidates are more viable for the role you’re offering.
Step 2: Looking at their experience
It’s not necessary that the candidates you’re looking for have 2-3 years of experience at an MNC or FMCG. Their experience can be in anything related to English. Perhaps they worked as Student Tutors (ST) or Teaching Assistants (TA) under one of their course instructors, and helped students with their papers and assignments. Or, perhaps they provided online help with English homework for school or college kids.
While checking the experience section on their LinkedIn profile, note the responsibilities they had. If some of their previous job responsibilities match your job description, you can consider giving them a shot at the position.
Step 3: Seeing if they were involved in any extracurricular activities
This is something that doesn’t need to be in line with the work they’ll have to do at your company. A student’s ECAs show how good they’re at maintaining a balance between academics and other activities. ECAs also promote leadership abilities, help develop interpersonal skills, and so on.
Most English majors often find themselves working for their campus newspaper. This is something you could look forward to while screening some of the candidates.
Step 4: Looking at their skills
The skills section on LinkedIn is very important. As an English major, some of the skills the right candidate should have include essay writing, blog and article writing, press releases, feature writing, copyediting, proofreading, etc. Apart from all this, you should also keep tabs on the technical skills they might have. Currently, you’d want your recruit to be somewhat familiar with WordPress, Microsoft Word, Google Docs, maybe PowerPoint, and any other tool or software they might have to use for their job.
Step 5: Looking for samples
A list of skills and experience isn’t convincing enough. For that, you’ll want to see some actual proof of their work. Hence, you should look for samples of their work. They could be anything - academic papers, blogs, published articles, etc. The ‘Featured’ section in LinkedIn is usually where people put up links to their online portfolio or projects. So you should start by checking over there. In some cases, they might even have their website which contains all their work, and that’s something you should appreciate.
Step 6: Striking a quick conversation with them
You’ve gone through their profile, analyzed their grades and work experience, and had a really good look at their portfolio as well. You’re almost convinced that this particular person is your guy or girl. This English major is the perfect fit for the role you’re offering at your company. Yet, you want to make some final assurances. You want to seal the deal, but before that, you want to understand them a bit more. What do you do? You simply set up a quick meeting with them.
LinkedIn has done a great job so far, providing you with all the information you needed to do the initial screening. However, to know your candidates, you must talk to them, enquire about their skills, ask about their expectations, and so on.
Once you’ve completed all these steps, you’ll be done with the screening phase. By now, you have a list of eligible English majors for the job, and you also know about them in detail. All you have to do now is get in touch with them, have another small meeting with each of them, and make the final decision regarding who you’re going to pick.
