In addition to other recruiting tactics, you’ll want to know who to connect with on LinkedIn to attract and hire top talent.
Finding the right BDC manager for your car dealership can be a challenge, especially if you’re a small business with a limited recruiting budget. But social media is a powerful recruiting tool, especially LinkedIn. Using the world’s largest professional network is bound to generate some good leads on qualified candidates, but only if you know who to connect with on LinkedIn and how to leverage those connections to turn them into candidates.
If you’re not already familiar, a BDC (business development center) manager, or sometimes just business development manager, is someone at a car dealership responsible for turning inbound marketing leads into customers. BDC managers create user experiences on a dealership’s website to engage prospects and ultimately get them to visit the dealership in person.
A strong BDC manager is important because so many potential customers do their research on the internet long before they ever step foot inside a car dealership. That means they’re already educated on the product before they meet with a salesperson face-to-face. It’s a BDC manager’s job to ensure the education a customer gets from the company’s website is engaging and informative so that a potential buyer feels more comfortable making an in-person visit. A BDC manager is your public face, so If you don’t know where to look for candidates, the role can be hard to fill.
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Who to connect with on LinkedIn and how to find them
While there are plenty of ways to recruit top talent, there are few better or less expensive than LinkedIn. The reason that LinkedIn works so well is because it leverages the relationships you already have to develop new ones. However, there’s more of an art to it than just logging in and connecting with anybody you see. It helps tremendously to know who to connect with on LinkedIn to maximize the effectiveness of your recruiting.
LinkedIn makes it relatively easy to do this. If you see someone who is a second-degree connection, for example, that means that you and that connection have a mutual connection already. Ask the first connection to introduce the two of you (the easiest way is for them to share your contact information in a message to the other person), and now you have a new first connection, and hopefully, a new relationship to build.
While it’s easy to make new connections, it’s not very helpful if you don’t know who to connect with. On LinkedIn, you’ll find hundreds, even thousands of people, but not all of them are prospective employees.
If you don’t already have one, create a company page where you can post about your business and even post job openings (though this comes with a fee). You can then see the people who’ve viewed your company page or job opening and check to see if they have the qualifications you’re looking for.
Another way to target connections is to search for people who already hold the BDC manager job title. When you decide who to connect with on LinkedIn, send them a connection invite with a personalized message, so they know you’ve taken the time to learn something about them. Even better, ask a common connection between the two of you to make an introduction. This infuses trust into your first meeting, which will make it much easier to talk about the opportunity you may have for the new connection.
Finally, spend some time searching through the networks of people with whom you’re already connected. If you have a friend in the industry, for example, look through their connections to see if they may know someone who might be a good fit for your BDC manager opening. If that someone isn’t a good fit, maybe they know someone else who is. Just remember to only connect with people who have the potential you’re looking for. Racking up connections can saturate your network, making it much more challenging to target candidates.
Knowing who not to connect with is as important as knowing who to connect with on LinkedIn. Stay away from competitors, and anybody who you don’t think will help you with your mission. Try also to avoid connecting with people you don’t know at all, as these attempts are often fruitless and can be a significant waste of your time.
Remember that recruiting is very similar to sales, and sales is based on relationships first. Build relationships with people who may be good candidates or who may know good candidates and nurture them, so they lead to a productive place for you. If you’re still not sure who to connect with on LinkedIn, start with the people you already know and expand your network from there.
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