Recruiting via social media is an effective way of recruiting talent, and there is no doubt that LinkedIn is the best social media platform for finding sourcing top candidates. Home to more than 645 million users around the world, it is easy to see why so many companies are using LinkedIn to find new employees every day.
Of course, the size of LinkedIn is not only its greatest strength but also its greatest weakness in some ways. With so many people using the platform, finding the top talent can be tricky. That’s why we’ve put together this quick guide to using LinkedIn more effectively…
Improve Your Searches
Perhaps the most vital element to finding and recruiting top talent on LinkedIn is improving the quality of your searches. With so many people to choose from, you need to be able to more effectively narrow down your talent pool and better searches are the best way to do this.
On LinkedIn, you can search for talent by their job title, location or even the organization they are currently working for, and it’s a good idea to make use of these search parameters to really refine your results and find the perfect fit for you.
Use Employee Referrals
Approximately 80 percent of recruiters think that employee referrals are the best channel for recruiting the top talent. Individuals recruited in this way tend to be a better fit for the company’s culture. They also tend to stick around longer and perform to a higher standard than employees recruited through other channels, so it makes sense to use the LinkedIn Referrals feature.
This is a relatively recent feature that automatically flags up individuals who are first-degree contacts with your existing staff members if they are likely to fit the criteria for any roles you are openly advertising on LinkedIn. It will deliver a summary of suitable matches to employees each week as a way of increasing engagement. It can be extremely effective.
Create a Better Company Profile
If you want to find the top talent on LinkedIn like a professional recruiter, you’ll need to ensure that your company profile is impressive. Try treating it like you would a landing page on your main website and include lots of information from blog posts to staff images, employee testimonials, and of course, detailed job listings and it should attract more interest. You should aim to pique the interest of viewers by giving a real insight into your company’s culture, so potential employees can see themselves working for you.
Look Within Communities
LinkedIn is home to a lot of communities, which are, by their very nature, self-selecting groups of skills and interests. Users only join communities that they are interested in and active within, so it means that you can very quickly identify the talent you’re looking for to assist with your staffing issues.
By searching in these communities, you can not only find talent who you may want to reach out to, but who have not come up in your previous searches, but you can also find individuals who are very active in your industry, and who may be influencers. You can also see who is most passionate and knowledgeable about the community at hand. This is a perfect way of finding great candidates you might otherwise have missed.
Screen and Verify Candidates
Once you’ve narrowed down a pool of people you think would potentially be a good match for your company, it’s a good idea to use LinkedIn to get a more comprehensive picture of each individual. Look at their credentials and view their endorsements and recommendations as well as their work history and you should be able to narrow things down even further.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of fake profiles on LinkedIn and you do not want to waste any of your time with them. By checking out as much of their verifiable information as you can, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort further down the line.
Use InMail Effectively
LinkedIn’s InMail feature is an excellent tool for getting in touch with candidates. Reaching out to them on a personal level via private message is an excellent way to show them that you are really interested in them, and to gauge how good a fit they would be for your company. So, it’s not surprising that you’re 3x more likely to get a reply when using InMail than you are using standard email.
Post Regularly
Posting a lot of status updates is an excellent way to show candidates what your business is about. It will also give you more exposure, which means any job listings you post are more likely to be viewed by the right people when they are posted.
Use the Q&A Question
The Question and Answer section on LinkedIn is a surprisingly useful tool for establishing relationships with the top talent in your field. It is also a decent way of finding users who may be very influential in your niche. These are the people who could help you to find the top talent in your niche and becoming well known by them, and interacting with them regularly will help you to build valuable connections as a result.
Utilize Sponsored Jobs
The “Sponsored Jobs” feature is an excellent way of getting your job listings to feature high in the “You May be Interested In” area of the homepage. It can attract more attention to your job listings, and LinkedIn says that candidates are 3x times more likely to apply for a job located in this section. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that all of those applicants will be of a high-quality, which is where some of the other tips above come in.
Finding and recruiting top talent on LinkedIn is more of an art than a science, but if you use the information above, you should find it a whole lot easier to get the right candidates for your roles first time. Of course, if you don’t have the time required to do this, hiring a recruitment company to do the hard work for you is always a good option too.
