By Mario Mora*

During the past 3.5 years that I have been leading FirstJob, I have had the chance to work with over 100 companies in Latin America, helping them improve their experience of recruiting young professionals and their Employer Branding. A typical question these companies ask is whether it is convenient to hire LinkedIn and the business solution services they offer. Knowing the situation of these companies, the reality of the Latin American labour market, the short answer to this question is always NO.

LinkedIn was born as a “social network” that, as years went by, found two ways to make money: advertising and recruitment. The explosive growth that the network has had around the world and the use that some professionals make of it, leads us to believe that “everybody is here”. However, that is not always the case.

The first thing to do is to understand the company’s situation: what is the percentage of my workers that use LinkedIn? How many vacancies will I have to fill this year? What is the goal I am looking for in LinkedIn? What are the most difficult, or the most massive, or the most scattered positions I need to cover? How many new candidates will LinkedIn bring me?

Once the analysis is done, and one grasps the implications of such an investment, I suggest making a survey among your employees asking two simple questions:

1) What are the channels you use to look for a job? And 2) through what channel did you arrive at your current job?

According to our own experience, around 10% to 15% of your workforce uses LinkedIn to look for a job. Around 3% to 7% of your employees arrived at your company through LinkedIn. This effectivity index could help us come up with the maximum annual budget we can invest on this social network.

An annual Enterprise investment in LinkedIn is around USD 25.000 or more. My goal is to help you save that money by analysing one by one the services they offer.

Recruiter

“It enables unrestricted access to LinkedIn profiles, using advance filters for vacancies, communicating with candidates through InMail messages (for license) and using project folders to manage recruiting processes”.

 Cost: around USD 9,000 per license.

 Low cost solution: if you really have trouble contacting the passive candidate you are looking for and have not even been able to contact a recommended candidate, I suggest buying a Job Seeker or Sales Premium (LinkedIn solutions for people), which’s cost goes from USD 29,99 to USD 99,99 per month per license.  You shall be saving over USD 7.000 per year. Having said that, Enterprise enables you to save data about the candidates if a member of your team leaves. You need to evaluate whether the possible data loss is worth USD 7 thousand per year per license.

Job Slot

“Space to make job offers in LinkedIn. It shows vacancies to profiles that strictly match the profile by using our algorithm” (which is not really that true, as, for example, the recommended job offers we receive by mail from LinkedIn do not necessarily fit our profile). With this tool we reach active, not passive, candidates. Therefore, is not really helpful is we consider that the number of people desperately looking for a job here is rather small.

Cost: around USD 15.000 for 11 spaces.

Low Cost Solution: Post the job openings in your profile o company page and address then to the recruiting sources you use. This strategy is for free! 

Career Page

“It enables you to have a page in a particular language. The content is flexible and you can upload videos, links, images, and invite employees to comment on the reasons for which they enjoy working at your company. It includes 433,000 banners impressions (companies’ advertisement to attract people). The banner will appear on the profile of people who do not work at your company, but may be recruiting target.”

Cost: around USD 20,000.

Low Cost solution: Manage your company’s page for free. There you can have statistics, post jobs, pictures and any kind of content you want….for free! You may lose in terms of design, but employer branding can be built through other things which are more important, such as employees’ testimonies and creating a true desire to work at your company.  Here is an example of our page, where we currently share job offers. Some facts: we grew on 5,000 organic followers in just six months and our posts have over 500,000 views per month without us paying any money for it. Furthermore, if you want to advertise, the cost per a thousand views is around USD 13. Therefore, 433,000 views have a real cost of USD 5,629.

Work With Us

“It allows you to block advertising space in the profile of every worker of your company. So, any person entering the profile of the company’s employees will see the banner of your company, welcoming them to join the company, follow the company’s page or learn about the opportunities they may have. That way, you may avoid having the competition’s banner in the profile of your employees.”

Cost: around USD 6,000.

Low Cost Solution: it does not have one, but it is an utterly unnecessary expense. Usually, people actively looking for a job will just add the target company’s recruiters, in order to be acknowledge by them. Those of us who work in Human Resources have in our network people from the same area in other companies, but that is not the rule for other areas. Plus, this does not work in the mobile version of LinkedIn. And you must bear in mind that blocking your competitors does not generate Employer Branding.

Finally, according to my experience, at least in Latin America, those who pay for these services are international companies that can arrange better prices. But, my advice is that you do not use your budget on this, unless you are willing to burn down money.

*Mario Mora is Founder & CEO of FirstJob.

Source: LinkedIn