You can spend all the time mastering your job advert, but if you don’t put it in front of the right people, you won’t find the top candidate you desire.
That’s where using LinkedIn to recruit people is a smart idea.
With over 20 million professionals using the platform, it gives you access to a wealth of professionals and can work out a lot cheaper than posting your job advert on multiple ineffective job boards.
Another reason why you should use LinkedIn to recruit is its sharing capabilities, with many of your current employees having the power to repost your advert and contact some of their trusted connections.
In essence, it’s free and effective advertising.
However, like most processes, there are ways of doing it more effectively.
With this in mind, here are some essential steps to ensure you get the most out of using LinkedIn to recruit.
Create a company page
If you haven’t already, you need to address the basics by creating a company page on LinkedIn.
Just like Facebook, this is where you can post relevant marketing content, advertisements and videos for your followers to see.
It’s free to set-up and should only take a couple of minutes.
Although, don’t make the mistake of rushing this process and making silly errors.
For instance, one pixelated profile or banner image can tarnish your business’ reputation.
So, make sure you use images that adhere to the latest recommended dimensions.
Get your employees to follow
Once you’ve sorted out your company page, you need some followers.
The best place to start before you can use LinkedIn to recruit is to encourage your current employees to follow your page.
After all, there are no better ambassadors than your own workforce.
Your employees will then be able to like and share any new job advert you post onto their own feeds.
So, if one of them has 300-800 connections, you’re already potentially reaching an untapped, relevant audience for free when they interact with your post.
And if one of those 300-800 people likes your post, it then reaches the feeds of their 300+ followers. It’s a dominoes effect worth thinking about.
Find candidates
There are a number of free and paid ways to use LinkedIn to recruit top professionals.
Search bar
For starters, you can use the search bar at the top to type in a field/job role you’re looking for and discover an array of professionals.
If you find what you’re looking for, you can then send a connection request and drop them a message.
And the best part of all is that you know you’re going to find the types of candidates you want to speak to, as it’s a social media platform dedicated to professional use.
Paid advertising
For a more in-depth search and to cut the headhunting time, you can pay for LinkedIn to advertise your job posts.
LinkedIn’s recent development of their built-in algorithm studies profiles and puts your job advert in front of matches.
Like a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign, you can tweak keywords, your target audience and many other variables to reach top professionals in your industry.
However, you’ll be competing with other job adverts in certain demographics and words, so finding the right formula for success can take time to master.
To maximise your chances of sourcing candidates via LinkedIn ads, it pays to go beyond top-line variables and get more specific by including education, industries, experience and location required.
Keeping it vague will increase the likelihood of your job advert finding the wrong audience and spending more money in the process.
But before you start using LinkedIn’s paid services to find candidates, think about how often you’re going to use it annually.
If you only recruit a couple of candidates a year, advertise via LinkedIn on a pay-per-click basis.
Whereas if your business if growing quickly and you’ll need to fill at least 12 new jobs over the next year, Job Slots is better value.
For a set fee, this will enable you to swap one job ad out for another every month to make sure you always have a spot guaranteed to be seen by relevant candidates.
Headhunting technology
The final way to use LinkedIn to recruit candidates is to use LinkedIn’s other paid features – LinkedIn Recruiter and Recruiter Lite.
Both of these allow you to source skilled passive job-seekers instead of just looking for the active ones.
There’s no GDPR to worry about, email subject lines to think about.
Most professionals will open your private message and click on the link to the job advert to find out more.
And you won’t need to send a connection request and run the risk of diluting your strong pool of professionals on your personal account.
Like LinkedIn ads, there are different pricing options depending on your needs.
For example, if want to post several job ads over the next year, LinkedIn Recruiter is the best option for you.
This feature gives you access to every profile, use premium search, monitor analytics, use hiring workflow tools and send up to 150 InMails to non-connections.
In contrast, Recruiter Lite is ideal if you only need to recruit a handful of people or if the positions aren’t hard to fill, as this feature only lets you send 30 InMails, on top of unlimited access to all 3rd degree connections.
Final thoughts
At the end of the day, using LinkedIn to recruit people is only effective if you know how to use it.
Once you’ve created a fantastic job advert, experiment with the free and paid options to see which methods bring you the most success.
You might find simply connecting and messaging or getting employees to share your post delivers a top candidate.
Or you may need to invest some money into LinkedIn ads if you’re not receiving quality applications quick enough.
Either way, give LinkedIn a go and see what works for you.
James is the founder and owner of AdBuilder and a recruitment expert from Sutton Coldfield in the UK. He regularly advises companies on how to improve and get the maximum ROI from their recruitment processes and advertising.
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