Social Recruiting for SMBs: SmartRecruiters and LinkedIn Show the Way

 Jérôme Ternynck is the chief executive officer and founder of MrTed, a company that helps businesses of all sizes find local talent on a global scale. Jérôme started his first recruitment company at age 24 in Prague and continues to be passionate about solving talent acquisition problems, fighting the status quo and developing innovative solutions.

I believe that businesses can become better simply by hiring better people. Large global companies understand this and pour lots of time and money into developing recruitment solutions that will yield a competitive advantage. But what about small and medium-size businesses – the SMB market?

At MrTed, we believe these companies are underserved in the North American market. According to the most recent statistics from the U.S. Census Bureau, only 3,761 businesses out of more than 12 million firms in the U.S. have more than 2,500 employees. Companies with fewer than 2,500 workers employ 81 percent of the American workforce, but most talent acquisition solutions are geared toward larger companies. SMBs may not have the large budgets that enterprise-class clients have, but most SMBs only need a fraction of the functionality.

That’s the beauty of MrTed’s SmartRecruiters recruitment software. It’s designed specifically to help these SMBs hire the best available talent, and the basic free level of service is sufficient for most people. SmartRecruiters allows companies to:

• Build a strong career site that integrates seamlessly into your existing company website and helps you develop an employer brand
• Gain visibility from thorough recruitment metrics that let you see what’s working (and what’s not) in your recruiting practices
• Benefit from innovative Open SaaS technology that is a mashup of Software-as-a-Service and Open Source technology
• Leverage pay-per-use services when needed, including LinkedIn services such as job posting, profile search and referrals.

The margin for error in hiring at a SMB is much smaller than at a larger corporation – one bad hire can be far more disruptive than for a larger company. However, using SmartRecruiters and LinkedIn together gives SMB users a head start in the race toward the future of talent acquisition: Social Recruiting.

Social networks for professionals such as LinkedIn make it easier than ever to find referrals for your open positions and actually know who you are hiring. Used the right way, social networking can help you reach a broad audience of people who have the skills you need. Social networking tools are currently changing the way people find jobs and employers find job candidates, and SmartRecruiters and LinkedIn want to put SMB users at the forefront of these changes, whatever the future holds.

We want to help SMBs:

• Find candidates easily: LinkedIn job postings can help you target candidates more effectively and tap into a huge network of over 65 million professionals. You can now post a job on LinkedIn directly from the SmartRecruiters product.
• Build a strong employer brand: With our Company Insider widget, you can help job applicants get to know your organization and people better.
• Access talent to build your company: With access to LinkedIn profiles, you can know that the most complete candidate information will be available in your recruitment software.

Like LinkedIn, SmartRecruiters is committed to the online community of our users. Our SMB users drive the pace of innovation with our software and have a convenient source for answers to recruitment questions, big and small.  The SmartRecruiters/LinkedIn partnership makes it easier to connect with and hire the best and brightest people out there without breaking the bank.

Sign up for the free and easy SmartRecruiters today and join our community to let us know how we can continue to meet your recruiting needs. And find out more about how LinkedIn Recruiting Solutions can give you access to the best talent, regardless of your company size.