LinkedIn Tips for Recruiters

LinkedIn is at the heart of any talent acquisition team. Here are our tips and tricks to help you get the most out of the tool.

As with any job, recruiters need specific tools and resources to do their job to the best of their ability. One of the most widely used tools among recruiters today is LinkedIn Recruiter - the all-inclusive hiring platform that allows recruiters to find, connect with, and manage potential candidates for the different positions they are hiring for. What really makes LinkedIn Recruiter so powerful is its ability to provide a single place for recruiters to source, contact, and keep track of all potential candidates.

As with any tool, it is what you make it - and if you don’t understand how to use it, you may end up spending more time googling the functionality of the tool rather than sourcing candidates! With a platform like LinkedIn Recruiter, which has so many different functionalities, it can be difficult to get a full understanding of how to use it most effectively. Not fully understanding how to use this platform could make a recruiter’s job unnecessarily time and labor-intensive, which is why it is important for all recruiters to know all the tricks of the trade when it comes to using LinkedIn Recruiter.

To save you time - and hair-pulling google searches - we have compiled some of our best tips and tricks so that you can get the most out of LinkedIn as a Recruiter!

Tips to increase company page visitors

1. Keep your profiles updated. Let's start off with the basics - profiled update. Keeping your personal and company LinkedIn profiles professional and updated will give candidates a better idea of who you are and what you do. LinkedIn is often the first place where candidates will interact with your company, so it is as important to update your profile as it is your website. By getting a fully up-to-date and credible snapshot of you and your company, candidates will feel more comfortable engaging with you.
2. Continuously market yourself and your company. Staying active on LinkedIn by consistently posting both on your personal and company profiles will allow those who view your profile to get a better understanding of what you do. Something to keep in mind is that the algorithm normally boosts posts by people more than posts by company pages, so creating a personal LinkedIn brand can do a lot for your company’s brand awareness! It also shows that you know what you’re doing in your industry and are keeping up to date with it. Turning on Creator Mode also helps the algorithm boost your posts more than the typical user. Lastly, consistent updates on your profiles will allow you to reach a larger audience and grow your following.
3. Join LinkedIn groups. Joining industry-specific, alumni, and local and regional business groups and staying interactive in them will keep you up to date in your market and industry and will help you grow your online following. This will in turn help you reach a larger talent pool and increase your chances of being noticed by top talent.
4. Make and maintain meaningful connections. As a recruiter, it is important to have as many LinkedIn connections in your industry as possible. However, the point is not just to have as many connections as possible. It is equally as important to ensure that the connections you do have on LinkedIn are meaningful and have substance. You can avoid meaningless connections by connecting only with people that you know, are in your industry, or have similar interests to you and by clearing out any connections that are irrelevant. You can create substance in your connections by interacting often to make sure that you and your posts remain at the forefront of your connections’ minds and feeds.
5. Encourage your team to stay active. Encouraging the people you work with to update their profiles, market themselves, join LinkedIn groups, and make and maintain connections on LinkedIn will assist in increasing your company’s reach and following on LinkedIn. This will allow you and those who work with you to increase your potential talent pool when sourcing for the ideal candidate.
6. Level up your job posts. In an age where the candidates have their pick of where to work, it is important to market your company and the position effectively. Job ads with no vibrancy or with too much information will likely turn people away. Creating job ads that are engaging and have only the information necessary to catch potential candidates’ attention can be really useful. Adding animation, emojis, and creating a short video job ad can help!
7. Boost your job posts. If you have the budget for it, using paid advertising can boost your engagement. And if you don’t have the budget to do that, get your colleagues to interact with your ads as much as they can to boost their exposure. The interaction doesn’t even need to be too time-consuming, even just having people click “read more” and comment on the post can give your posts a big boost! And lastly, making use of commonly searched keywords in your ads can also help.

Tips for sourcing the ideal candidate

1. Quality check your top-of-funnel efforts. The people doing your recruitment are likely the first people that candidates will interact with from your company. In order to ensure that your recruiters leave the candidates with a good initial impression of your company, it is important to ensure that all of your recruiters are reaching out to candidates using the same high standards. The kinds of things you can standardize include:
   • Ensuring everyone sets up a search strategy before recruiting.
   • Regularly reviewing inmails and making use of A/B testing.
   • Training recruiters on how to ensure a good candidate experience.
   • Workshop with recruiters on the company pitch.
   • Making sure recruiters understand how to collaborate with clients and candidates
2. Know the candidates you want to target. Having a thorough understanding of the kind of candidates you are looking for will save you time when flipping through profiles. You can create a thorough understanding of your ideal candidate by creating a candidate persona. A candidate persona is a semi-fictional representation of the ideal candidate for the job. Starting your candidate persona can look like evaluating your current top employees and noting things like their education, previous experience, motivation, skill set, and personality. Then you can get to work on finding more people like your top performers. If you need a bit more of an explanation of candidate personas, check out our other blog!
3. Use the "Similar Profiles" function. This function allows you to select the LinkedIn profile of a top performer in your company in the specific role that you are hiring for and then the platform will search for candidates with similar qualities, experience, and skills. Using a profile that is up to date will get the best results. Using the similar profiles feature is simple, just find the profile of the employee you are using as a reference and on the right rail of their profile page, you’ll see five similar profiles and if you click on “More similar profiles”, you’ll be able to browse through all the candidates that measure up to your current top performer.
4. Always create a project on LinkedIn Recruiter. This helps you keep everything for each recruitment assignment in one place and save time by making it easier to navigate and sort through potential candidates. Another helpful feature when using projects on recruiter is that can make use of the recruitment activity filter in the Advanced Search section that allows you to hide candidates already in your pipeline for that project. This will also save you time because you won’t have to sift through candidates already in the pipeline when looking for fresh talent.
5. Look at your followers. 58% of the people who follow your company want to work for you! Going through the profiles of your followers to find potential matches is a good place to start your search because it is highly likely that if you reach out to these potential candidates they will respond.
6. Search for related terms. If you have been sourcing using the same keywords for a while and you find that your talent pool has dried up, try searching for terms related to your current keywords to bring new candidates into your talent pool. For example instead of searching for “React developer” use “React.JS”. It is also a lot more effective to use the keyword search rather than using the Skills and Assessments filter, as this filter often excludes relevant candidates from your search. And using quotation marks in your keywords to group words together - like “data analytics” - makes it more likely for those words to be highlighted in your candidates’ profiles.
7. Save your top searches. By saving the searches that have provided you with the most promising candidates, you can create weekly alerts that notify you when new candidates have entered your talent pool.
8. Read the candidate profile. This seems pretty straightforward, but a lot of people will reach out to candidates without properly reading through their profiles which can waste time. Properly reading through their LinkedIn profiles before adding candidates to your pipeline prevents time wasted on candidates that are not a good fit for the company or the position. It can also give you insight as to how you should customize your InMail to increase response rates.
9. Find a skill-set link. You are more likely to find a candidate who is a good fit for the company and for the role you are looking to fill if you source candidates who have skills and interests that match those of the company. Remember to look into their more recent skill sets, and not what they were doing five years ago! To find out what they’ve been doing more recently - and if they’ve been updating their LinkedIn profile - you can just read the description that they put under their current and previous jobs. If they haven’t updated their profile, you can look into the most recent companies they’ve worked for and get an idea of the kinds of projects they’ve been working on from there. Sometimes finding out their skill set will need to require actually reaching out to the candidates.
   
   

Tips for reaching out to the candidates

1. Respect candidates' wishes. If a candidate has specified on their profile that they do not wish to be contacted for new positions, don’t contact them. Reaching out to them will make them think you didn’t bother to read their profile and will leave them with a negative impression of your company. Getting multiple unwanted InMails a day is enough to drive someone off LinkedIn, which ultimately shrinks your talent pool.
2. InMail with care. You are talking to real people, not bots - which means that generic InMails do not attract the same attention as something genuine, authentic, and to the point. To get a better response rate, make sure your InMails are personalized and candidate-specific, making use of you, your, yours pronouns, as well as making small adjustments in your text to fit the profile of that specific person.
   
   ”We have a top-notch development team and frontend development skills, such as {candidate-specific skills} like yours would be a perfect addition!” Something you can try is to look over the InMails you’ve received in the past and use the ones that caught your eye as inspo! If it attracted your attention, it may well attract the attention of your candidates."
3. Include only the most important information in your mail. While having a short and to-the-point InMail is important, you should always include some information about the company and the role that showcases the company’s culture and values, and the candidates’ opportunities for growth in the position. This shows the candidates that you respect their time because they can immediately decide whether they are interested in getting in touch with you.
4. Skip the personal introductions. Since your InMail should be short and sweet, you can save on word count by skipping the “Hi my name is…” and instead using the first line to grab the attention of the candidate. They will know who you are by looking at your LinkedIn profile, and this way you can use your first few words to personalize your InMail to the candidate: “Company X is expanding and your article on github really grabbed my attention."
5. Have a clear job description. Keep your job description inclusive by leaving out industry jargon, company-specific words, abbreviations, and acronyms. Including more information about the position’s tasks, responsibilities, and benefits and less information about job requirements will also attract more candidates’ attention. It’s tempting to put the job description in your InMails, but to make sure your InMail doesn’t get too wordy, you can just include a link to the full job description and direct application page.
6. Include a specific call-to-action. Suggest a specific date and time that you are available to have an initial screening chat: “We would love to talk with you in more detail. I’m free to call Wednesday from 3 pm onwards, Thursday at 10 am, and Friday at from 9-10 am. Do any of these time slots line up with your schedule?” If this is too wordy for you, you can just include a link to your Calendly or a similar meeting link to give the candidates a chance to book a time that suits them!
7. Ask the candidate to follow your company on LinkedIn. Doing this will benefit both you and the candidate. The candidate will be able to stay updated on your company and any other roles that you are advertising in the future, and you will gain more followers which means more brand exposure.

No job is easy, but with these LinkedIn tips and tricks, we hope that your recruitment process is just a little easier to manage.