Future of Campus Placement and Role of Placement Officer

This is my first blog and what a way to start writing this blog!!! I recently wrote and published a book, “Get Recruited Through LinkedIn: Creating Your Personal Brand and Finding a Job using LinkedIn.”

In the book, I have described how LinkedIn has already started affecting the way recruiters from various companies, recruit candidates. With the introduction of LinkedIn, the role of recruiting consultants has drastically reduced, because recruiters are able to get a list of high quality candidates from the LinkedIn database.

However, the biggest change will be seen by Placement Directors / Officers or Career Services Directors.

When recruiters can reduce their recruiting costs by more than 80% and LinkedIn providing a complete suite of talent management solutions to recruiters, it is, but obvious for recruiters to opt for LinkedIn’s talent management solutions.

LinkedIn’s talent management and recruiting solution provides a number of advantages to recruiters. I had written about these solutions in the book, which I am reproducing again now. I am presenting only the advantages here, as it will give you an idea what I mean.

LinkedIn Recruiter allows recruiters to get unlimited access to anyone on LinkedIn

Recruiters can expand their reach far beyond their personal network and search from the widest and most qualified talent pool of over 332+ million members. This number would have increased by now. A rough estimate now would could be safely assumed to be 350 million members.

LinkedIn Recruiter allows recruiters to find the best talent faster with targeted search filters

Recruiters can create more than 20 filters to help them breeze through even the toughest searches for candidates on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Recruiter provides the most advanced search interfaces and exclusive refinement filters, including years spent at a company, and field of study. This makes it easy for recruiters to find talent.

LinkedIn Recruiter allows recruiters to contact candidates directly

Every recruiter gets 150 InMails per month to contact their most preferred candidates. Unused InMails roll over to the next month.

LinkedIn Recruiter allows recruiters to boost their recruitment productivity

Recruiters can create up to 50 search alerts that help them to spot talent automatically. Recruiters can use One-to-Many InMail messages and saved templates to let them contact more candidates faster.

LinkedIn Recruiter allows recruiters to stay on top of candidates

With the click of a button, recruiters can stay up-to-date on the activities of sought after candidates so that they are ready to reach out when the candidates are ready for a job change.

Additionally, LinkedIn Recruiter and its talent management solutions also provide analytical tools that can help keep all recruiters on the same page, ensuring continuity of work, if an old recruiter happens to leave the company.

Why should you be interested in this? You should be interested because you need to know what makes recruiters attracted to your profile. You need to be seen positively in the eyes and ears of recruiters, and for doing this, you will need to be extremely active on LinkedIn.

My book on “Getting Recruited Through LinkedIn” highlights what you will have to do to ensure that you are seen positively. Please purchase the book from www.amazon.com/s/keywords=B019T7XH72.

Students will have to create very strong LinkedIn profiles, because of some of the reasons I have mentioned above, in terms of the services LinkedIn provides recruiters.

Students will have to understand that if they have to be recruited, they will have to compete with not just the students from their college or batch, but with students from other colleges too, because recruiters will have access to far too many students at the click of a button.

As students, when you read the book, you will understand what I mean. Create your brand using LinkedIn and you will see the difference.

For you to create your perfect LinkedIn Brand, your Placement Director will have a critical role to play. Your Placement Director will no longer be a “Placement Officer” but a “LinkedIn Services Officer” or “Director of LinkedIn Services.”

The Placement Department will cease to be a one-man show. The Placement Department will be renamed Career Services Department or LinkedIn Services Department, and will be a complete organization within the University Structure. The structure of the LinkedIn Services Department will look something like this.

All members of the team in the Career Services Department need to have very specific skills that will help them showcase the University to the world through LinkedIn. Some of the skills that will be required to successfully manage the LinkedIn Services Department of a University include:

1. Search Engine Optimization

2. Social Media Marketing

3. Search Engine Marketing

4. Internet Marketing

The same set of skills would be required by the student coordinators, something that may call for some of the most excellent students to lead their respective batches / groups. The LinkedIn Services Director would be playing a very critical role in ensuring that the students get placed in companies of their choice through LinkedIn.

Additionally, the department coordinators and student coordinators will need to start working towards developing the students’ LinkedIn profile from the day they join. This is where the Director of LinkedIn Services would have to prepare a strong policy document that will help the students to develop strong LinkedIn Profiles.

It is not only important for the students to develop strong LinkedIn profiles, but also for the university or college to develop a very strong LinkedIn profile. Ultimately, the students’ profile will be associated with the institution’s profile, and recruiters would be interested in not only the student but also the institution from where the student has graduated.

To be continued…

#LinkedIn #CampusPlacement #PlacementOfficer #Universities #Colleges #EducationalInstitutions