When it comes to recruiting top talent, LinkedIn has positioned itself as the ideal platform. With over 1 billion users from 200 countries, there are 49 million professionals seeking employment on the platform each week.
This is why recruiting on LinkedIn is a popular strategy among top brands. However, consistently finding the right hires on the platform goes beyond having an active profile. You need to develop a strategic approach and a recruitment marketing funnel that ensures you consistently find and attract the best candidates.
In this article, you'll find invaluable insights into social recruiting and how you can leverage LinkedIn's talent pool to give your business an edge over rivals.
Why Recruit on LinkedIn?
As a social media platform, LinkedIn falls behind Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram when it comes to monthly active users. However, it's still the number one option for recruiters.
Why is that?
Well, it's simple. Beyond the social element, LinkedIn's mission is to "Connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful". Because of this, it has the highest concentration of professionals actively looking for jobs.
Moreover, there are platform benefits that make it ideal for social recruiting:
- Mobile-friendliness- As soon as your job postings go live, they'll be pushed to the mobile devices of candidates, increasing your reach
- Designed for professional engagement- With a design centered on enhancing and building professional networks, it is much easier to identify and engage professionals
- Go-to platform for job seekers- Thanks to years of branding and success stories, most job seekers begin their search on LinkedIn
Top 10 Strategies for Recruiting on LinkedIn
Now that you know how recruiting on LinkedIn can power your company's growth, it's time to learn how to capitalize on it. Considering that over 67 million companies have a LinkedIn profile, you need the right strategy to stand out to candidates.
1. Join Industry-Specific LinkedIn Groups
Beyond the personal and business profiles, there are LinkedIn groups for nearly every geography, industry, function, and subsets of each of those. Each group caters to the needs of unique target audiences in particular sectors. As such, networking in LinkedIn groups is a great way to begin your hunt for candidates.
In these groups, you'll find experts, entrepreneurs, and job seekers in your industry. Beyond serving your recruiting needs, it's a great way to know what's happening in your sector and forge partnerships.
Depending on the group's rules, you can post job openings for members to apply to. With some groups having tens of thousands of members, you can have plenty of leads in a short time.
Alternatively, you can contact suitable candidates without posting on the group. Once you're in a group, you can access its members by clicking the "See all" button in the member's right-corner section. From there, you can explore to find the members with the appropriate experience and qualifications for the role.
While you can find suitable job candidates quickly in LinkedIn groups, avoid being spammy, as it's against the rules of most groups. In addition, it ruins the perception group members have of your brand.
2. Regularly Sharing Job Posts and Articles on Your LinkedIn Page
At its core, recruiting is about filling positions before they become vacant. Rather than wait until you need someone to fill a position to begin looking for candidates, you start early. Such an approach helps you get higher-quality leads and saves you money on recruiting.
Adopting a similar approach to LinkedIn recruiting will also yield better results. Before posting job openings, begin engaging with your audience and making your brand more recognizable.
An easy way to achieve this is by sharing articles and posting regularly on your LinkedIn Company page. Such posts can range from industry news to insights about your company and employees. This is an effective long-term strategy because people want to work at brands that they recognize and know what to expect as employees.
If your posts get engagement, be sure to respond to comments and address concerns or inquiries promptly. As you do this consistently, potential candidates will want to join your company long before you post vacancies.
3. Harness the Power of Keywords
If you want the competitive edge that comes with top talent, your recruiting goals should go beyond filling positions; it should be about finding the perfect fit. To do this, you'll need to go beneath the surface of the talent pool to find suitable candidates.
This is where keywords come into play. Incorporating particular phrases or words can help you hone in on specific qualifications or competencies. So, begin by determining what you expect or desire from an ideal candidate and create a list of keywords for those attributes.
As you do this, focus on key elements such as the job title, tag lines, skills, location, candidate experience, certification, etc. With your list, use LinkedIn's search options and start filtering. For better results, it's advisable to use a boolean search as it will help pinpoint candidates that meet your expectations.
While you'll have numerous recommendations, you may have better results reaching out to candidates within your network.
4. Search for Passive Candidates
According to LinkedIn recruiting statistics, passive candidates account for 70% of the global workforce. While these individuals are not actively seeking a job, many are open to new opportunities.
To tap into this talent pool, you should search for individuals holding similar roles and add them to your recruitment marketing funnel. As you begin outreach, ensure you capture their attention with a well-crafted message.
Some of the measures you can take to optimize cold outreach results for passive candidates include:
- Create a short and captivating subject line
- Mention a mutual connection, such as an employee
- Tailor each message to the recipient
- Add unique benefits they'll get from your company
- Include a CTA and mention the next steps if they're interested
5. Take Advantage of LinkedIn Private Mode to View Candidate Profiles
Anytime you view a person's profile, LinkedIn normally notifies them. As a recruiter, having candidates know you're looking at their profile is not ideal. Considering you'll have to go to their profiles multiple times, it will not present a good image of your brand.
The good thing is that LinkedIn has a private mode that allows you to view candidates' profiles in secret. This feature allows you to remain in control of when and whether or not they find out you're interested in hiring them.
You can turn on private view by scrolling to the LinkedIn Settings & Privacy section, clicking on "Profile viewing options", and then selecting "Private View".
6. Develop an Organization System for Candidates
With a large talent pool across your network and groups, expect numerous applications. Along with coming from different sources, you'll have to review each candidate and others multiple times, making it challenging to manage them.
As a result, it's not uncommon for LinkedIn recruiters to lose great candidates. To avoid this scenario, you should leverage LeadDelta. This tool makes it easy to manage LinkedIn users even if they're not in your network.
Anytime you view a candidate's profile, you'll see a Lead Delta sidebar prompting you to add their profile to Lead Delta. Furthermore, you can apply custom tags to each candidate to simplify management. Aside from their stage in the recruiting marketing funnel, these tags can group them according to the suitable role, priority level, etc.
7. Use Templates to Increase Your Reach
You'll rarely ever be short of things to do as a recruiter. Therefore, the last thing you want to do is add to have time-consuming recruitment process. With plenty of candidates to reach out to, crafting new messages for each will take too long.
Moreover, it comes with the risk of sending subpar outreach messages that are either not opened or fail to persuade candidates. Instead, have a well-crafted template that may only require minor tweaks. Along with expediting the process, a good template will also improve results.
8. Optimize Your LinkedIn Company Page
As an employer, how candidates perceive your brand greatly impacts your ability to attract top talent. This is why taking proactive measures to improve your employer branding is essential.
In such pursuits, your LinkedIn company page is an invaluable asset. Use it to show potential candidates what your organization represents and how you treat employees. Aside from inbound recruiting with curated content, you can also use the following tools to improve your employer branding:
- Employee testimonials
- Press releases
- Recruitment videos
- Compelling graphics
By showing candidates that your employees have a positive work experience, they'll also want to join your company.
9. Take Advantage of Your Team's Network to Find Candidates
Beyond certifications and skills, numerous factors influence whether a candidate will be a suitable fit for your organization. Such factors range from temperament, ability to work under pressure, being a team player, etc.
As you may know, these are things that are not easy to gauge before hiring someone. Luckily, you can overcome this challenge by tapping into your team's network. Along with having connections with suitable candidates, they may have some insights about them that'll improve your decision-making.
More importantly, this approach will expand your reach significantly, increasing your chances of finding the best candidate for the role.
10. Allow Applications via LinkedIn
When you're looking to fill a position, every obstacle candidates face as they apply will reduce your reach. This is because many of the people who may be interested are already employed and will not jump over unnecessary hoops to be considered.
Therefore, you should take proactive steps to make the application process as easy as possible. In this regard, there's no better option than allowing them to apply on LinkedIn.
Through the 'Easy Apply' feature, it'll only take a few clicks for candidates to apply for the job.
LinkedIn Recruiting Pitfalls to Avoid
In addition to using the best strategies for recruiting on LinkedIn, there are mistakes you can make that will undo everything.
Here are some pitfalls to avoid in your search for talent:
1. Focusing Your Recruitment Budget in One Area
Social recruiting offers different sources of candidates. Once you get some success with one avenue, you may be tempted to focus your recruitment budget on it.
However, that may not be ideal. Instead, try and build various sources and track their performance. It's only after you have a clear picture of what to expect from each that you can focus your resources on a particular avenue.
2. Overusing InMail
InMail can be a powerful tool when reaching out to candidates. But you must be careful when using it, as LinkedIn users are generally apprehensive about unsolicited InMail. To help address this issue, LinkedIn's Recruiter InMail Policy states the following:
- Don't distribute untargeted or unwanted mass InMail messages
- Don't use InMail for event invitations
- Don't use InMail for marketing campaigns
Should you violate these stipulations, your profile will be flagged or banned. In most cases, you'll receive a warning notification along with tips to improve response rates if it's less than 13%.
3. Using Corporate Jargon
Even if you're targeting seasoned professionals, InMail is not the place to stuff corporate jargon. It will put off candidates, causing them to skip the message quickly.
Instead, keep your messaging simple, clear, and concise. Also, incorporating a friendly and personable tone in your InMail messages can significantly enhance engagement and foster a more positive impression among potential candidates.
Empower Your Business With Effective Recruiting on LinkedIn
Whether you want to fill a senior management position or find a reliable IT expert, recruiting on LinkedIn will guarantee results. The platform has many professionals looking to advance their careers at the right companies.
However, you must adopt LinkedIn recruiting best practices to appeal to the best candidates. From using InMail sparingly to building a great employer brand, taking the right steps will make your company appealing to top talent.
As you prepare to leverage LinkedIn for recruiting, ProIQ is your ideal partner. We offer recruiting solutions to help companies scale. Our services also include marketing, data analytics, strategy, and finance.
Contact us today to learn more about how our recruiting solutions can help elevate your company to even greater heights.
