Hiring Managers can be elusive! Here’s how to find them and land interviews on LinkedIn
“Talk to the hiring manager, show them that you are interested in a role, you will easily land an interview!”
This is the most commonly heard advice whenever you are looking for new career opportunities and trying to crack the code for how to land interviews. No doubt this is great advice but before you can talk to a hiring manager, you also need to find them! No one, literally no one ever tells you how to find those hiring managers. Your best bet to find and connect with them is if someone in your network knows them personally/professionally and can make an introduction. What are the odds of that happening frequently? Very low.
In this blog article, I am going to talk about how to strategically find hiring managers on LinkedIn and significantly improve your chances of interviewing with the company. Though you still might be wondering, “Even if I find them, why would they be interesting in connecting with me?” The answer to that is — They are interested in connecting and they are looking for YOU. Trust me!
#1 Plan and stay focussed
Create a list of top 10 companies where you are eagerly looking for an opportunity to interview. Follow the process below for each company one by one.
#2 Filter people with the similar role
Let’s take an example: If you are looking for product management roles within Google, you’ll want to filter all the product managers within Google. The seniority of the role does not matter which means that you need to be looking for PMs, Senior PMs, Group PMs, Director PMs, and so on. You are basically looking for everyone in the product function. Use a filter like below
#3 Look for people with #Hiring filter on their profile picture
Once you have filtered people within the same function, quickly scan the search results, and look for a purple colored #Hiring filter on the profile picture. Hiring Managers generally hire for their own team. So click on the profile of the person and you should be able to find the team that the person works for through their experience timeline or title. You’ll get an idea of which team they might be hiring for. This is one of the easiest ways to get started.
#3 Look for “Hiring” keyword in the headline
Hiring managers leverage their headline as well to indicate that they might be hiring for certain roles. Filter the results with query like below to filter people with “hiring” keyword in their headline.
#4 Look for the “Hiring” keyword in the title
Some hiring managers even use their title to indicate that they are hiring for their team. First apply the basic filters like below
Now click on “All Filters” and scroll to the very end of all the filters. You’ll see a Keywords filter like below
You can just add “Hiring” keyword in the title field and you should see everyone who is using title to indicate that they are hiring.
#5 Look for hiring posts by the hiring manager
Hiring manager often post links to job openings that they are hiring for. First, create a query like below where you are looking for hiring ‘posts’ for a certain role
Then click on “All Filters”, scroll all the way to the bottom and select the “Author Company”.
Voila! You should be able to see all the hiring posts made by hiring managers from a specific company. You won’t believe that hiring managers go as far as dropping their email address on LinkedIn hoping that people would write back to them.
Be sure to invest in a LinkedIn premium subscription. It can help you in 2 ways, one, you can write InMails once you have found the desired hiring manager, and two, you’ll know if the hiring manager looked at your profile or not after you sent them an InMail or a connection request.
Are there tips that you have found useful while looking for hiring managers on LinkedIn? Feel free to share it below with the other readers!
