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LinkedIn is the biggest professional network in the world with 756 million members in over 200 countries. So, of course, it’s a prime spot to source talent.
However, premium job listings on LinkedIn can be expensive. And there are tons of companies and recruiters on LinkedIn all vying for the top candidates.
Don’t worry, we’ve got the workarounds and useful tips to make sure you acquire the best talent without breaking the bank.
Why Using LinkedIn for Recruiting is Worth It
There are many channels you can use for recruiting. So why should you make LinkedIn a priority?
Extensive Reach
LinkedIn has become a staple networking channel for professionals across all industries. It’s a given that job seekers will use the channel to find new opportunities and share their most up-to-date information. This means there’s a huge pool of talent at your fingertips.
Recruit Passive Candidates
LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to reach out to the best talent even if they aren’t actively seeking employment. These passive candidates may be open to new opportunities but are not active on job boards. Using LinkedIn’s advanced search tools, you can find candidates with the precise experience and qualifications you’re looking for and let them know you’re looking.
Learn About Your Target Candidates
LinkedIn provides ample opportunity for personalization. All you need to do is look at a candidate’s LinkedIn profile to see what drives them. As a recruiter, you can use this information to your advantage when putting together job descriptions and reaching out to candidates.
Showcase Your Company
There’s more to recruitment than a bunch of candidates scrambling to find work. It works both ways–you have to make the company attractive to potential employees, too.
Your company pages allow you to share your people, culture, industry perspectives, and so on in a way that appeals to the candidates you want to target. Where better than a social network to grab people’s attention and engage potential candidates who may not have known about the company otherwise.
The Investment Needed to Use LinkedIn for Recruiting
The level of investment here depends on your requirements.
First, you can post a job on LinkedIn for free. However, this option is limited. You can only have one job listed at a time, and its visibility will decrease over time. This is not good if you’re, say, a large company searching for multiple candidates at a time.
Promoted job listings come with more benefits. For instance, they appear first in job recommendations, and LinkedIn automatically sends notifications to qualified candidates.
You’ll be charged for a promoted job post on a cost-per-click basis. But you can set a daily cap on your spending according to your budget.
It’s difficult to determine exactly how much each click costs as the price fluctuates daily. But when you consider that the average LinkedIn ad click costs $5.26, posting jobs on LinkedIn can get relatively expensive.
But don’t write off LinkedIn job posts just yet. You’ll likely get a much better deal by using applicant tracking software that partners with LinkedIn.
When you sign up to Freshteam, for example, you can post multiple limited job listings on LinkedIn and other major job boards for free. These job posts will be available through search and links on your company’s LinkedIn page.
The platform also offers job description templates to help you get started, and you can publish the posts to different boards with just one click. Furthermore, you’ll be able to manage incoming applicants from the various channels in one place, collaborate with your team, and create custom workflows for the hiring process.
7 Steps to Use LinkedIn for Recruiting
Here we’ll cover how to post a job on LinkedIn, along with the steps you should take before and after creating your listing. Plus, there’s a ton of advice on how to use LinkedIn as a recruiting tool successfully.
Step 1 – Enhance Your Company Page
It pays to have good foundations in place before you post a job on LinkedIn. When a candidate sees your job, they’ll likely visit your company page to do some research. So you need to make a solid first impression.
Fill in as much information as possible so candidates can easily learn everything they need to know about the company. Include useful links, a company description, product details, locations, and specialties.
Those are just the basics. You should also use your company page to entice candidates.
Use compelling images, perhaps even behind-the-scenes images, to showcase company culture and help candidates imagine where they could fit in. This is from eBay’s company page, for example:
Make sure any copy reflects your brand personality, achievements, mission, and values. Show that your company isn’t a nameless entity–it’s a great place to work.
Here, eBay talks about its mission to help every individual, entrepreneur, and small business succeed. It’s an attractive mission statement. So you can imagine that others would want to be a part of facilitating it.
Step 2 – Write a Compelling Job Description
Like your company page, your job description is another asset you use to appeal to candidates. A good job description does some of the pre-screening work for you.
You’ll always have unqualified candidates applying for positions. But, hopefully, the job description is clear enough in its responsibilities and requirements sections, etc., that those who aren’t right for the position or vice versa won’t apply. This will save you the time you’d otherwise spend sorting the wheat from the chaff.
The easiest and quickest way to put together job descriptions is using templates. Perhaps your HR team has internal templates for different categories or roles.
Alternatively, Freshteam has hundreds of unique job description templates for various roles in a range of industries.
If you’re starting from scratch, be sure to include a job summary, the responsibilities of the role, and the candidate’s requirements.
To make your job description extra compelling, add a section on what candidates can expect from the role. This outlines the key benefits of taking the job, e.g., learning and advancement opportunities. You may even wish to add a section that outlines the candidate’s career progression, which is important to many applicants.
Step 3 – Post the Job on LinkedIn
If you decide to use recruitment software, you’ll be able to post jobs to multiple boards and channels, including LinkedIn, from directly within the platform.
If not, here’s how to post a job on LinkedIn manually:
Click the Jobs icon in the menu bar.
Click the Post a free job button in the left-hand menu.
Fill in the job title, company, job location, and employment type. Then click Get started for free.
Copy and paste your job description into the relevant box and add up to ten required skills.
Select how you would like to receive applicants–by email or via a link to an external website. The latter may be a link to a Google Form or your careers page, for example.
When you select Email, you can add screening questions for applicants. LinkedIn makes some suggestions, or you can add your own.
You can choose to auto-reject candidates who do not meet your pre-screening requirements. Those candidates will be sent an email regarding the status of their application.
Click Post job for free to make your job post live.
Next, you have the option to promote your job post. Click Edit at the top to set your daily or total spend limit. Click Promote job to proceed.
If you do not want to promote your job, continue by clicking Select free.
Step 4 – Share Your Job Post
Whether you create a free job post or promoted post, it’s always a good idea to share it with your network. This extends the reach and visibility of your job post as much as possible.
The first place to share the job post is on your company’s feed. Then, it’ll show up in your follower’s main feeds when they visit LinkedIn. This is a good idea because, by following you, they’ve already shown an interest in your company. So there will likely be potential candidates in the mix.
Also, share the job post on your personal LinkedIn feed, and encourage other staff members to do the same. You’ll reach even more relevant candidates in their networks.
Next, you should share your job post in relevant LinkedIn groups. To find the most appropriate groups, simply type keywords related to the role or your industry into the search bar. Then select the Groups tab at the top.
It’s better to post in groups that you already actively engage in. That way, your post won’t seem spammy.
Step 5 – Consider Upgrading
Perhaps you want to handpick some strong candidates or garner the interest of passive candidates. The best way to do this is to reach out to individuals directly.
Admittedly, it’s difficult to find and contact LinkedIn members with a free account. But it’s not impossible.
With a free account, you can do just three searches per week and only send InMail messages to members you’re connected to. So if you see a promising candidate, you’d have to make that connection first before sharing an open position.
Premium accounts, however, allow you to do unlimited advanced searches, browse unlimited accounts, and send a certain number of InMails to people you aren’t connected to each month.
Therefore, you may wish to upgrade to a premium account, such as Recruiter Lite.
However, a premium membership doesn’t come cheap at $99.95 per month billed annually. So you have to figure out if the return on your investment will be worth it.
Step 6 – Send Personalized Messages
If you decide to use InMail to reach out to potential candidates, a simple “Are you looking for new opportunities?” isn’t going to cut it. This is particularly true for passive candidates.
If they know nothing about your company or receive lots of similar copy and paste jobs, they’ll just ignore the message.
So you need to make sure your message stands out by personalizing it. There are several ways you can go about this.
Look closely at the candidate’s LinkedIn page to determine their interests and values. Draw on these by explaining how the open position reflects what they care about.
Alternatively, you can mention their experiences and achievements and explain why they stood out to you as a candidate. We all love a bit of flattery!
You could even start with a soft connection. Send them a message about something they posted and continue the conversation from there.
Step 7 – Monitor Your Job Posts
You can learn a lot by monitoring the performance of your job posts. For instance, there may be room for improvement if your job posts don’t get as much attention as you expected. Or you can figure out if LinkedIn is an effective recruiting tool for you overall.
LinkedIn provides a range of data in reports. This includes the number of job views, number of applications, view to application rates, and demographic information about candidates.
Alternatively, if you use applicant tracking software such as Freshteam, you’ll be able to access extensive reports for multiple recruitment channels. For example, you can learn where applicants find you to determine the best recruitment channels. Or keep track of the status of applicants to make sure the hiring process is organized and that nobody falls through the cracks.
Next Steps
As mentioned, a great job description will help you entice the best candidates. If you’re recruiting for salespeople, take a look at our guide to writing sales job descriptions. It also includes long-term strategies for attracting top talent.
Already bagged a great candidate? The next step is to onboard them effectively. You shouldn’t overlook this process because a positive onboarding experience encourages new hires to stick around. If you want to improve and streamline the onboarding process, you should check out our guide to the best onboarding software.
