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How to Effectively Source Candidates from LinkedIn: A Recruiter's Handbook
When it comes to candidate sourcing, LinkedIn remains the best choice for recruiters to find highly talented individuals. Launched in 2003, LinkedIn has the world's largest talent pool, with more than 1 billion users in around 200 countries and territories worldwide.
Having said that, there are some major challenges recruiters face when using the LinkedIn job platform as their primary source of hiring candidates. We have listed one of the few difficulties hiring managers face while hiring candidates from LinkedIn.
Candidate Sourcing from LinkedIn: Key Challenges
An Ocean of Talent Pool: We already know that LinkedIn has the largest professional network, as it has more than 1 billion members. To source a candidate best-suited for your open position can be very difficult because there are too many profiles active on LinkedIn. This makes it difficult to be distinct and get noticed by the right candidates.
Incomplete LinkedIn Profiles: One of the major drawbacks of LinkedIn sourcing is that most of the profiles are not updated or complete. Due to this, recruiters find it hard to get complete information about a candidate's qualifications and experience from LinkedIn profiles.
Too Much Focus on Network Expansion: LinkedIn is very different from other famous candidate sourcing platforms. It not only gives job seekers and job providers an opportunity to get connected, but it also helps the members increase their reach and professional network. It means that not every LinkedIn member is actively looking for a job, and not every recruiter is in the process of sourcing a candidate.
To overcome the key challenges of LinkedIn candidate sourcing, we are providing you with all the important steps you need to take in order to hire the perfect-fit candidate for your open job role.
How to Effectively Source Candidates on LinkedIn?
If you are looking to hire candidates from LinkedIn, then this article is for you. It will provide you with comprehensive details on how to source candidates from LinkedIn. These candidate sourcing ideas will help you find potential hires for your organisation on the LinkedIn job platform.
Define your candidate hiring criteria: If you want to recruit the top talent in your organisation from LinkedIn, the first thing you need to do is set the correct eligibility criteria. You should clearly mention the skills and past relevant experience that are mandatory for a candidate. Once you make a plan around this, you can start talent hunting on LinkedIn.
Use LinkedIn Recruiter: LinkedIn Recruiter is a very efficient candidate sourcing tool. It can help you expand your search and narrow your results with its special features and resources.
Sourcing through LinkedIn recruiter helps you filter the candidates by job titles, locations, and skills. It helps you save your custom filters to minimise manual work on your next search. Also you will get candidate recommendations based on your open roles
Use LinkedIn Search: LinkedIn Search is a powerful tool to find talented candidates as per your requirements. You can use search to find the right candidates by location, keyword, industry, and other strong searches.
To source a suitable candidate as per your desired requirements, you can also run a Boolean search on LinkedIn. You can do it by combining the right keywords with operators like AND, NOT, and OR during your LinkedIn search.
Look for Actively Job Seeker Candidates: LinkedIn’s badges are very helpful in identifying the candidates who are actively looking for a new role. You can search for candidates who have the "Open to Work" badge added to their profile.
Also, as a recruiter, you can use the “Hiring” badge in your profile so that candidates can approach you for relevant jobs.
Send Personalised Messages to Potential Candidates: LinkedIn gives you the freedom to connect with candidates directly through messages. If you have a vacancy open for a role, you can contact the best-fit person by sending them a personalised message. You can also check his profile to understand his previous experience and authenticity.
When you reach out to a candidate, be sure to personalise your message and elaborate to them why you are interested in them and why you think they would be a good fit for the role.
Use LinkedIn's InMail Premium Feature: LinkedIn's InMail is a premium feature, and with its help, you can send messages to a LinkedIn member who is not in your contact list. This feature also helps you source a candidate from LinkedIn.
You can save a lot of time with customisable InMail message templates and bulk-messaging capabilities
Post a Free Job on LinkedIn: If you want to effectively source candidates from LinkedIn, you can create job posts on LinkedIn job portal to showcase open positions at your company.
You need to understand all the best practices for posting jobs on LinkedIn before starting the process. When you post a job to hire candidates, LinkedIn will notify the connections in your primary network so they can also share the job with their own connections.
Use LinkedIn Sponsored Jobs: LinkedIn Sponsored Jobs help boost visibility of your best roles, to help you fill the open positions quickly. When you sponsor a job on LinkedIn job platform, it shows at the top of LinkedIn’s personalised job recommendations or ‘Jobs You May Be Interested In’ feature.
With the pay per click concept, you have the freedom to choose how frequently and when your sponsored jobs show up in this top placement. By using this premium placement, you can make sure that even more qualified passive and active prospects view your top jobs at the ideal moment.
Source the Candidates through LinkedIn Influencers
Find industry influencers who connect with your target talent pool. Look for professionals with a strong LinkedIn presence, expertise in the relevant field, and a positive reputation.
Reach out to influencers and propose a collaboration. Offer incentives (e.g., a referral bonus) for them to share your job posting with their followers.
Encourage influencers to personalise their repost by adding their own words and highlighting aspects of the job that might appeal to their followers.
Post the Job on Your Company’s Page
If you are a hiring manager, you can also post the job on your organisation’s page and can request the followers to share it to their network.
How to Post a Job on LinkedIn:
If you are looking to hire a candidate from LinkedIn, then you can create online job posts on LinkedIn job portal to showcase open roles at your organisation. After posting the opening, LinkedIn will notify your colleagues and connections in your primary network, so they can also inform people in their own networks.
Linkedin users can post up to one free job at a time and a fixed number of free jobs in a 30-day time period. You can also associate the job posting with the organisation's LinkedIn page to increase its authenticity. Here is how you can post a job on LinkedIn to hire perfect fit candidates for your open position:
Step 1: Login to your LinkedIn account and click on the “Jobs” icon given in the header section.
Step 2: Click on the “Post a free job” button to post the open position.
Step 3: Once you click on the above mentioned button, it will redirect you to a form where you need to fill in all the important details such as, Job title, Company, Workplace type, Job location, and Job type.
Step 4: You can use ‘Write with AI’ to create the job description or you can also write it on your own.
Step 5: On the next page, you can choose the mode of application collection and ask for additional details from the candidates. You should add a minimum of three screening questions to help you identify the best-fit applicants. If you choose the mode of application as email, the following window will be visible:
If you choose mode of application as At an external website, following window will be visible:
Step 6: To increase the visibility of your job post on LInkedIn, you can add #hashtags as per the relevance. Example: #hiring, #reactjs, #frontenddeveloper #remotework
Once you complete the above mentioned steps, you can post a job for free to effectively source a candidate from LInkedIn.
In order to make room for newer job ads to be noticed by job seekers, free job posts gradually lose visibility in search results. Your job posting will be stopped and taken down from search results when a predetermined number of applications are received.
You can also promote your job posting by setting your daily or total budget for the job posting to increase its visibility.
Difference between LinkedIn free and promoted jobs
LinkedIn free Job Posting:
- Visible in search results
Enable you to gather applications on LinkedIn and to organise and filter them with ease. - 21 Days visibility.
- Limited number of applicants.
LinkedIn Job Promotion:
- Shown in top searches and also with promoted tag.
- High visibility in job recommendations.
- Remain active until you decide to close them, or they will expire after six months.
- 3X more best-fit candidates than free job posts and unlimited applicants
How Hireintel and LinkedIn Make a Hiring Dream Team
HireIntel blends effortlessly with the world's best professional network, LinkedIn, boosting your hiring efforts.
- Streamline Applications: Applications from LinkedIn posts flow into HireIntel's central platform, eliminating manual work.
- Using LinkedIn Jobs: HireIntel is also compatible with LinkedIn if you are posting a job on LinkedIn using LinkedIn Jobs — as a company page.
- Using Personal Account: There are times when you may need to have candidates’ attention using a personal account. Luckily, posting a HireIntel job link on a personal LinkedIn account is a breeze.
- Use LinkedIn Jobs with HireIntel: In the ‘Apply’ section, you can choose ‘External Link’ and paste the HireIntel application link.
LinkedIn Job Posting With HireIntel
You can create a job posting with the Hireintel tool and then post it on LinkedIn to source the best candidates. Once you complete the job creation part at https://hireintel.ai/, you need to go to the ‘Launch’ section to generate the application link. You can use the link provided to set up the application link on your desired job portal.
Then, you will get another option, i.e., posting directly on LinkedIn.
Now, for this approach, you will get two options: using AI-generated content (or a pre-built template) to post the job on LinkedIn, or you can customise the JD as you like and then go ahead.
You can also click ‘Post on LinkedIn’, to directly post your HireIntel job to LinkedIn.
FAQs
Q. What are the most effective strategies to hire candidates from LinkedIn?
Ans: The most effective ways to source a candidate from LinkedIn include creation of job postings with correct keywords and using LinkedIn Recruiter tool to efficiently search and contact potential candidates.
Q. What is the benefit of Boolean Search in sourcing a candidate on LinkedIn?
Ans: Boolean Search on LinkedIn helps hiring managers and recruiters to narrow down search results by mixing keywords with operators like AND, OR, and NOT.
Q. How do I send an InMail message to a LinkedIn member?
Ans: From your search results, a project, or a member's profile in LinkedIn Recruiter, you can send an InMail message to a LinkedIn member. You can send direct messages to members with whom you are not connected by using your InMail credits.
Q. Can I post a job in LinkedIn’s Talent hub?
Ans: Yes, you can post jobs in LinkedIn Talent Hub to showcase the open vacancies at your company. These job positions can be viewed by job seekers all over the LinkedIn network and will be recommended to preferred candidates through the Job Recommendations feature.
