How to Use LinkedIn to Source Top Candidates
A tech startup enlisted my team to fill a data science role, and their requirements were highly specific. They wanted someone with deep experience in machine learning, which is already a limited talent pool. But on top of that, they also wanted a candidate with strong business sense. I knew there was a 90% chance the type of professional they were looking for wasn’t actively job searching. To find candidates with this unique blend of skills and experience, my team turned to LinkedIn.
Using two trusted LinkedIn sourcing tools–LinkedIn Recruiter and Boolean searching–we were able to find someone who had everything the client wanted in a matter of hours. As I guessed, he was currently employed. One of my recruiters reached out with a personalized message highlighting why the opportunity was a great fit for his background. Within minutes, we had a response: “Funny timing–I’m not job searching, but this role sounds like it would be perfect for me.” Three interviews later, he accepted the offer. We never would have found him if we’d relied solely on job postings.
LinkedIn is the social network of a recruiter’s dreams, used by some 660 million professionals in 200 countries. Built specifically for the purpose of networking, it’s where people go to update their virtual resume, look for jobs, and develop beneficial professional relationships. For recruiters, it’s where hidden talent gems are found.
Despite its many advantages, LinkedIn has one big downside when it comes to sourcing candidates: it’s crowded. The wrong move can quickly take a good candidate from interested to irritated. In this article, we’ll explain how to source on LinkedIn for recruiting the right way and share some common missteps to avoid if you want to make the best impression on prospective talent.
Why You Should Use LinkedIn to Find Candidates
When candidates are looking for a new job (or just thinking about looking for a new job), LinkedIn is where they go to find information. 75% of people who recently switched jobs used the platform during their decision-making process.
LinkedIn is one of the top recruiting channels for the quality and retention of resulting hires. The platform says new employees sourced on its network are 40% less likely to leave the company within the first six months than candidates sourced via other channels.
LinkedIn sourcing makes sense for hiring managers and recruiters because of the platform’s core purpose: enabling users to make professional connections. Users are in a different mindset when they log onto LinkedIn than when they open other social media apps, like Instagram. They’re primed and open to conversations about their career.
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How to Set Up Your LinkedIn Profile for Success
You’re probably itching to dive in and start connecting with candidates, but it would be unwise to do this without first taking a close look at your own LinkedIn profile–both your personal page that represents you as a recruiter and the page of the company that’s hiring.
You want these profiles to be as compelling as possible so that when you do make contact with a prospective candidate, they see a strong reason to apply. Not only that, you also want to be findable. Optimizing your profiles ensures that candidates who are actively job searching discover your listings and your brand.
Let’s start with your personal profile–the one you’ll use to reach out to candidates.
Use a professional, clear, smiling headshot as your main profile picture. For your cover photo, a header that’s affiliated with your firm works well, utilizing the space to share information about what you do. If that’s not available, a landscape shot of your city or another neutral setting is a good option.
Next comes your headline–that’s the most visible text displayed right under your name. Most people use their job title, like Recruiter, or a summary of what they do, like ‘Connecting innovative tech companies with top talent.’ If a candidate looks at your profile, they should be able to tell immediately that you’re a recruiter who’s reaching out about a job opportunity.
Check out the profile of one of our senior recruiters for inspiration.
Next, ensure your LinkedIn company page is on point. Company pages are different from personal profiles in a few key ways. First, company profiles have followers rather than connections. Your followers are more than just a vanity metric; they’re actually highly indicative of whether a candidate will engage with you.
A LinkedIn member who is following your company is 95% more likely to accept your InMail message and 81% more likely to respond to it than a member who is not your follower. Hence, it pays to focus on growing an authentic following.
Secondly, a company page allows you to create offshoots, known as showcase pages, that are dedicated to specific products, services, or achievements. This is useful for helping visitors understand what you’re all about. Giving each business unit its dedicated space is helpful for large companies with many different brands or divisions under one roof.
Finally, and most importantly, company pages allow you to post your open positions, which helps interested candidates find them. You can add a job description, requirements, and desired qualifications just as you would in a standard job listing.
Consulting firm PwC’s company page demonstrates the job showcase’s appearance from its main profile.
Ensure your company page is 100% filled out and reflects your brand with your logo and current imagery. Post regularly so that your page looks fresh and up to date when prospective candidates land on it (we’ll talk more about content ideas for this below).
Encourage your employees to post and share their work experiences and accomplishments on their personal pages to boost visibility and share company updates.
How to Utilize LinkedIn’s Advanced Search Tools
Boolean search
Now it’s time to start sourcing.
This may come as a surprise, but LinkedIn’s regular search tool can only get you so far. Not only is everyone using it (and thereby getting the same results), but it’s also overly broad. Over the last few years, my team has invested in becoming proficient with Boolean search, a technique that yields more precise results. This has been a game changer for our ability to find the right candidates.
A Boolean search uses quotation marks to combine words and phrases and operators like “AND”, “OR”, and “NOT,” to narrow or broaden search results.
Here’s an example. Let’s say my team is looking to hire a marketing manager with experience in Google Analytics. If we merely search for the string of words, Marketing manager Google Analytics, we might get a few good results, but we also get many results that contain one or more of those words but are irrelevant to this particular set of needs.
Instead, we can use Boolean search to find people whose profile indicates that they’re both a marketing manager and have experience with Google Analytics. Here’s how:
“Marketing manager” ← tells LinkedIn you want to see profiles that contain this exact phrase
AND “Google Analytics” ← tells LinkedIn you want the additional exact phrase “Google Analytics” to be present in any profiles that contain “Marketing manager”
Now, we get much more specific search results.
The operator “OR” is helpful if you want to include alternate titles. In this case, “Marketing Manager” OR “Marketing Director” would return good results.
The operator “NOT” is useful for excluding terms and adding clarity. For example, if you’re looking for a summer camp counselor and not a counselor who helps people overcome personal challenges, you might search “Camp counselor” NOT “Mental health.”
Filters
Even when you use Boolean search, there’s a good chance you’ll be left with thousands of profiles to sort through. Filtering can help further narrow your search and ensure candidates meet specific criteria.
Here are some of the filtering criteria you can use to refine your results:
- Location
- Current employer
- Past employers
- Education
- Industry
- Specific keywords, like job titles
I’ll wrap up this section with one more trick my team uses when we’re sourcing candidates on LinkedIn: instead of starting at the top of the search results when reaching out to candidates, skip a few pages into the results and start there. The odds are that the profiles at the top of the search results receive messages from dozens of recruiters, but those further down the list might not be contacted as frequently and may be more receptive to your message. Profiles that show up on page 15 are less likely to be found by competitors, but are often just as qualified.
Tips for Getting the Most Out of LinkedIn Features
Again, I want to emphasize that if you’re merely using LinkedIn’s standard search function to source candidates, you’re not getting the most out of the platform. There are additional features that can greatly broaden your talent pool while simultaneously zeroing in on better candidates. Let’s discuss two of the most useful ones: LinkedIn Recruiter and Talent Insights.
These are both paid add-on tools, but they’re worth considering if you hire more than a few people a year or just need to source for one or two niche positions.
LinkedIn Recruiter
According to LinkedIn, it takes less than five minutes on average to find and engage a qualified candidate when using LinkedIn Recruiter. I haven’t tested that claim with a timer, but I can attest that it’s pretty close.
When you search from your personal LinkedIn profile, you can only see a person’s full details if you share a connection with them. LinkedIn Recruiter allows you to see the full profile of every candidate. It also gives you access to more than 40 filters to refine your search. You can save your best-performing searches so you don’t have to start from scratch each time and set up alerts for new candidates who fit your criteria. InMail messaging tools allow you to easily personalize your outreach with details about candidates’ experience, skills, or shared connections.
I’m excited about new AI-assisted tools that are rolling out on Recruiter this year. Some of the functionality that will soon be available will allow recruiters to leverage AI to formulate searches, match with best-fitting candidates, and craft personalized messages at scale.
Talent Insights
Talent Insights is a talent intelligence platform that helps recruiters use data to make more informed decisions. It’s useful before, during, and after the sourcing process.
Before you begin sourcing for a role, Talent Insights can give you information about the availability of talent with the necessary skills in your area and their median salaries. While you’re sourcing, recruiters can use its centralized dashboard to understand performance and benchmark against the market, with useful insights like where your competitors are sourcing talent. After hiring is complete, Talent Insights has tools for career pathing, development, and employee experience, all of which contribute to strong retention.
Together, LinkedIn Recruiter and Talent Insights are a sourcing powerhouse that allows my team to conduct effective outreach and make smarter hiring decisions.
Strategies for Engaging Candidates on LinkedIn
Once you’ve found a selection of high-quality candidates, it’s time to engage with them. Here are the strategies my team uses to get candidates’ attention and capture their interest.
Message at the right time
Part of my team’s success is using the platform at the right time. Believe it or not, the time of day you send InMail messages can determine how likely you are to get a response.
Think about it–if you’ve ever had to send an important email and you’re looking for a reply, you know that 4:30 p.m. on a Friday isn’t a very promising time to send your message. The same holds true for InMail.
LinkedIn recommends sending InMail between 9 and 10 a.m. on weekdays for best results. This makes sense because most people spend the first hour of their morning checking notifications, responding to emails, and getting up to speed for the day.
Avoid sourcing candidates on weekends if you can help it. Despite being a less busy time, LinkedIn says InMail messages sent on Saturdays are 16% less likely to get a response, and candidates might be turned off by a recruiter intruding on their personal time.
Enable LinkedIn applications
The next step is to enable on-platform applications via LinkedIn Jobs. This will allow candidates to submit applications for your open positions using details from their profiles without ever leaving LinkedIn.
You’ll have the option to enable LinkedIn applications when you’re publishing an open position. During the posting process, you’ll be asked whether you want to direct applicants to an external site (like your careers page) to apply or to allow them to apply on LinkedIn.
Enabling Easy Apply lets candidates complete an application in a few keystrokes rather than transferring everything from their resume and cover letter into a company’s online application system, which can be often tedious.
In addition to making things easier for candidates, enabling in-platform applications allows you to track and manage applications, communicate with candidates via messaging, and track the effectiveness of the channel as a recruiting medium. You also have the option to add a promotion budget to your job listings to help them reach more prospective candidates–more on this in a moment.
Related: Maximize Your Job Board Recruiting With These Strategies
Make postings and messages skimmable
We have multiple blog posts dedicated to writing compelling job descriptions, so I won’t spend too much time giving pointers on the actual content of your postings. I will point out that it’s important to make your job descriptions skimmable. No one wants to be hit with a wall of text in their inbox or on a link they click on.
So, break up the text of your job description into 1-2 sentence paragraphs, with the most important information at the top. Use bullet points to emphasize the most relevant information, like key duties, pay, and benefits. You can use this same strategy when you’re messaging candidates, using bullet points to hit on three or four of the most compelling reasons they’d be a good fit for your job.
Related: Best Practices for Writing Clear and Compelling Job Postings
Join and engage in groups
As a recruiter or staffing professional, this is where your personal account will come in handy. While a company page has many benefits, you’re currently limited to posting on your own company’s page when using a company profile. Your personal LinkedIn account lets you interact in groups and connect directly with other users. Group participation pays off; you’re 21% more likely to get a response from a candidate when you send an InMail to someone who shares a group with you.
Groups should be used for LinkedIn sourcing, and they should be approached organically. Join groups that are a natural fit, like those dedicated to job searching, networking, and continuing education within your industry. You might join groups specific to your city, like one for marketers in New York City. You can also look for groups dedicated to the specific role you’re looking to fill, like one for network engineers or CPAs.
After joining groups—and this part is crucial—interact within them. Don’t just pop in only when you have a new opening. Make it a point to stop by regularly and contribute to the discussion. It’s a great way to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s happening in your job market. Some groups even have dedicated threads where recruiters can post job openings.
Use advertising to broaden your reach
Sometimes, even targeted candidate outreach can be slow or ineffective. Putting a budget behind your sourcing efforts through LinkedIn advertising can help you reach more prospective candidates and deliver applicants faster.
To start advertising, you’ll need to create a LinkedIn Campaign Manager account. This is free and only takes a minute or two. From there, you can begin creating an ad.
Start by choosing your ad objective. For our purposes, this is most likely going to be conversions – job applicants (you can also use LinkedIn ads for things like generating B2B leads and selling products). Then, you’ll set up targeting using many of the same criteria you can use when filtering search results, like location and skills.
Next, you’ll choose your ad format. LinkedIn ads come in two primary flavors: content ads and message ads. Content ads display a piece of content, like a job posting or video, within a person’s feed. Message ads send your message copy to the inbox of people who match your targeting criteria. My team has seen success with both types of ads; the best thing to do is to test a few different campaigns to see what resonates with your audience and industry.
My team has achieved excellent ROI using LinkedIn ads to show different messages to different audience segments. For example, when recruiting for a remote position, we’ve found that candidates in different locations value different aspects of the employee value proposition. People who live in cities respond well to messaging about ditching their commute and having more work-life balance, while people in rural areas are more captivated by messaging about broadening their career options and unlocking higher earning potential.
By creating different ad campaigns for these different audiences–while driving them to the same job posting–we’ve seen a three- to four-fold increase in the number of completed applications.
LinkedIn Content Ideas for Attracting Candidates
Whether you’re posting organically or paying to reach more people, the type of content you use matters. Here are some ideas for LinkedIn content that will resonate with potential applicants.
Employee highlight reel
Focus on one employee and create a highlight reel of their success story with the company. Showcase their career growth, noteworthy projects they’ve worked on, and why they love being an employee.
Day-in-the-life video
Follow one employee or team through a typical day on the job at the company. For example, if you create a video centered on the marketing department, that video can be used to connect with candidates for a number of roles like social media managers, marketing analysts, and creatives.
Interactive polls
Use polls to engage candidates around relevant topics, like “What’s the number one thing you look for in a new job?” Asking pertinent questions helps start conversations while allowing you to learn more about job seeker preferences.
Company wins
Celebrate exciting milestones like new product launches, funding rounds, and team expansions. Candidates are grown to companies that are continuously growing and innovating.
Employee generated content
Amplify content posted by your employees when they talk about the company positively online. You can also encourage employees to share this type of content using a specific hashtag.
Hiring process insights
Re-engage candidates who have already expressed interest in your brand by sharing insights into your hiring process and tips about what to expect. For example, you might target your company page followers who already know your brand with a blog post walking through your interview process.
New hire testimonials
Use images or video to share a new hire’s feedback after joining the company. Ask them why they chose to work with you and what they love about their new job.
Job alerts
Let your LinkedIn audience be first to know as soon as new positions become available. Increase interest with language like ‘alert for you’ or ‘apply early’ to create a sense of exclusivity.
LinkedIn Analytics to Watch
InMail response rate
When sourcing candidates on LinkedIn, the bulk of your activity is going to take place over InMail. Thus, it’s a key place to monitor performance. Keep an eye on your InMail response rate. A low response rate may indicate that you’re reaching out to ill-fitting candidates, your messages aren’t tailored enough, or you’re not clearly communicating the employee value proposition.
Job post performance
Another big area of focus should be your job posts. Analyzing views, click-throughs, and completed applications will help you visualize a prospective candidate’s interaction with your brand. Low views or click-throughs could mean the job description isn’t compelling enough. A low application completion rate might mean you need to simplify the application process.
Follower growth
A strong employer brand attracts both active and passive candidates. The more candidates know about you, the easier it is to convince them to apply for a job. Monitor your company page follower count aiming for consistent growth, which indicates you’re increasing brand awareness over time.
Page engagement
Look at how your content is performing. Are people liking, sharing, and commenting on it? These metrics tell you whether your content is resonating with the intended audience. If engagement is low, you may need to allocate more resources to recruitment content.
Common LinkedIn Recruiting Mistakes to Avoid
Sending generic messages
This is the biggest LinkedIn recruiting blunder staffing professionals tend to make, sending impersonal, uninvited messages to a mass audience. It’s more than just a faux pas; LinkedIn has cracked down on InMail spammers in recent years, and doing this can get you blocked from messaging or even kicked off the platform.
Personalized messages are always a good thing -in recruiting and beyond. In marketing, for example, personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates than generic ones. Regarding consumer behavior, 59% of shoppers say that personalization influences their buying decision. LinkedIn has even noted the positive impact of personalization, pointing out that recruiters who reference a former employer in common when messaging a candidate are 27% more likely to get a response.
Crafting personal messages takes more time than sending a generic blast, but it pays off in the form of more interested, responsive prospects. So, how should you personalize your messages to candidates?
Reference a specific reason their profile caught your eye. You might cite their current job duties or previous experience that’s relevant to the role you’re looking to fill.
Reference connections you have in common or other candidates you’ve successfully placed from their company. If you have a mutual connection, this is a huge leg up, and even better if you can enlist that shared connection to make the introduction for you.
Reference information that you learned outside of LinkedIn. For example, you might comment on a recent blog they wrote for their company website or cite an article that featured their work. All of this shows you’ve done your homework and are connecting for a legitimate reason, not just to add one more resume to your stack.
Getting hung up on job titles
The same job may have a different title at different companies. A ‘human resources manager’ at Company A might be a ‘labor relations director’ at Company Band a ‘people operations specialist’ at Company C. That’s why I encourage my recruiters not to place too much weight on job titles and instead focus on skills, duties, and achievements. This is one of the many reasons Boolean search is so useful when sourcing on LinkedIn.
Judging profiles too harshly
LinkedIn is an incredibly helpful tool for job seekers and companies looking to hire, but it’s not viewed equally by each user. Just like many members of Gen Z have never created a Facebook account, some LinkedIn users set up a profile and never returned to add or update content. If you find someone that is intriguing based on some of the information on their LinkedIn profile, don’t assume that you’re seeing the full breadth of their capabilities.
Avoid casting harsh judgment on candidates who have incomplete or unimpressive profiles. Instead, use the site to reach out and start a conversation. Let them know about open positions and encourage them to apply. You might be surprised by their actual resumes and their performance in an interview. People may put more work into their resume than they do in updating their LinkedIn profile, especially if they are not actively seeking new employment and opportunities. If you like something that you see, reach out and see if there’s more there.
Open New Recruiting Channels With 4 Corner Resources
Are you relying on the same handful of recruiting channels every time you have a new opening? Are you frustrated by the quality (or lack thereof) of candidates entering your hiring funnel? It’s time for a new approach.
The team of staffing professionals at 4 Corner Resources can help you maximize the effectiveness of your existing recruiting channels and find creative new ones to reach more candidates. We’ll help you cut through the noise and reach the best talent in your field, including those elusive passive candidates.
To get started, contact us to speak with one of our hiring experts today.
