Recruiting is a tedious task to begin with. You have to go through each application you receive and try to gauge how well these people will fare in your company. There are specific skill sets you require your employees to have, and sometimes that is hard to find. But, with LinkedIn, things are made so easy that you may find your first hire almost immediately after you post your job.

LinkedIn has a tool called the LinkedIn Recruiter that filters through eligible candidates in order to find you the perfect match. This tool uses skill assessments, similar profiles, targeted messaging, and connection paths to better evaluate your candidates. LinkedIn practically does it all for you; you just have to choose the best fit.

Things can get a little confusing in the world of online recruiting, though. So, to better understand the ins-and-outs of recruiting on LinkedIn, this article will go through everything more thoroughly for you.

How to Use LinkedIn for Recruiting

The first thing you want to do, if you haven’t already, is to set up a Company Page. This is a place that potential clients and employees can find you and learn a little bit about who they are going into business or working with. You can share your company’s story and connect with current clients, partners, and employees to show your growth.

Advertising Your Job Openings

Once your account is all set up to impress fellow LinkedIn users, you will want to post your job openings on LinkedIn’s job board. There are a few ways to do it, but not all of them are free.

Pay-Per-Click Job Postings

The first is a Pay-Per-Click job posting. When you purchase one, you will be charged every time your posting is viewed. These postings are spread across LinkedIn from their job search to emails of potential employees that match the skills you need.

When you purchase a pay-per-click job posting, you can set a daily budget that will keep you from spending too much. When you reach your budget, your job posting will be paused and you will then have to decide whether to add more to the budget or close the job. Fortunately, you can receive a discounted price when you purchase a posting in advance.

Job Slots

Job slots are essentially job postings that you can buy once. You can continuously show multiple job openings for cheaper than it would cost you to buy multiple job postings. This way, you will have maximum coverage for potential employees and save money while you are searching.

LinkedIn has an easy system that helps you through each step. For each type of job posting, they have a template all ready for you to fill out. You can customize specific questions you would like to screen your applicants for, and you can request specific skill sets, locations, and many more things in order to filter your applicants.

Once you have gone through the steps to get your job openings out there, LinkedIn will send you recommended matches according to their helpful algorithm.

Use the Resources You Already Have

The employees that you added when you first made your business’s LinkedIn profile page could help immensely. By having them share your page, and any content on it could boost your viewing greatly. It would be seen by any connections each individual person has. That could bring you ten times the traffic you had before.

In order to better your odds in getting your name out there, you will want to post and share content on your LinkedIn profile regularly. Keep it professional and all about your business and your business’s morals and ethics. This will ensure people of similar character and skill sets will connect with you.

Use the LinkedIn Skill Assessment Tool

When hiring a new employee, the first thing most people look at is their new candidate’s skill set. LinkedIn’s skill assessment tool will allow you to assess each candidate for specific skills you may need for your company. It could be anything from specific computer software knowledge to experience in a specific job field.

In order for these candidates to have these skills on their profiles, they need to be able to pass a test for their chosen skills with at least a 70% passing grade. If they can’t do that then they will still be able to choose their skill set, they just won’t have the badge to prove they are actually knowledgeable within that skill.

What’s better, is when you are searching for specific candidates, you can filter through your chosen skill sets and annotate that the skills have to have a verified pass. If you want to go even further with a skill assessment, you can add in a job posting that candidates must take the skill assessment test and you will get a notification once they pass.

Using this tool, you will be able to filter through candidates that don’t have the skills that you require or the motivation to prove they actually have the skills. It can show you which candidates have initiative and drive, and those who don’t. Instead of spending hours sorting through job applications and searching for that perfect match, it can all be laid out in front of you on one screen, making the process that much easier.

LinkedIn Insights

If you are considering expanding your business, LinkedIn Insights can help you find where the competition is, who is finding your potential employees first, and where to open a new storefront. This tool uses data from the site’s professionals, businesses, and current job postings to find you the most informed information.

Here’s how to use it:

Choose your report type. There are two reports to choose from, the Talent Pool Report, which tells you where to find talent, whether that talent is involved with your company, and which schools this talent is coming from; and the Company Report, which tells you where a company is losing and gaining talent, what skills the company has, and which departments of the company are at risk.
Use these reports to decide where you will source your talent from and which skills you think your company will need most. The report will tell you what regions the talent is based out of and where the selected areas have gained and lost talent recently.
The reports can show you market trends and help you make an educated decision on which skills to look for, skills that are most common, which skills are quickly growing, and the hiring demand for these skills.
In a Company Report, you can compare your business to your competition. This shows you where each company is sourcing their employees from, where talent is coming from and where it is going, the skills needed and used in each company and the schools that the talent attended before hiring. Each section has the option to expand and show more in-depth information in each category.
A Talent Pool Report shows how engaged the talent was with your brand and business. This way you will better understand the talents values and responsiveness to see if it aligns with your company.
When deciding where to build your new store-front, LinkedIn Insights can help show you where the market needs your business and where you will likely find talent.

Consider Open Candidates

Open candidates are people that are willing to relocate for the job. They are a completely separate group of individuals that could expand your search for candidates. According to the LinkedIn, candidates that are open to relocating are more likely to respond to emails and messages.

Connect to Your Current ATS

Using LinkedIn’s Recruiter System Connect system, you will be able to take your current Application Tracking System (ATS) and connect it to LinkedIn Recruiter. This way you will see all of your applicants in one system instead of two platforms.

With this system in place, you won’t have to worry about the unprofessionalism of contacting the same person more than once and keeping your information up to date. LinkedIn takes its security very seriously, so you won’t have to worry about anyone taking your data. This service can connect to any ATS provider, some of which are ADP, Bullhorn, and Cornerstone.

Connect with People

When you are looking to recruit on LinkedIn, things can sometimes get a little pricey. Joining a couple of groups is a sure way to get your business name out there and connect with people interested in similar topics. And better yet, they are free!

Join or Make Groups

You also have the option of creating your own group. This way, you can grow a group of similar ideals and have a place where people can come to ask questions related to your topic.

Using this technique, you will have the opportunity to email the group members on a weekly basis for free. You will have the audience you need for recruiting and a free way to connect with them. Keep in mind, LinkedIn monitors any promotional content. Moderators, which would be you in this case, need to make the promotional post and post them manually.

This way, you won’t have any spam all over your group feed. And when it comes to group posts, it’s about quality, not quantity. If your group members feel like you’re spamming them, they won’t ever interact in the group.

The best way to use groups is for feedback on your company and brand. If you ask people what they think of your company directly, you’ll be more likely to receive helpful and insightful feedback.

When your group has fellow business owners or you are a part of a group with people of similar business goals, you can use them to ask for advice on issues or concerns you have for your own business. If you have no questions of your own, you can answer some questions that someone else might have. This way you can show your experience and expand your reach.

Spreading the Knowledge

What many people don’t know is that LinkedIn has a question and answer section that allows for free advice from people within and outside of your connections. You can ask a question pertaining to a topic involving your business, or you can answer a question having to do with something you have experience in. Either way, this is a useful tool in making connections and growing your brand.

Use the InMail System

This is yet another way to connect with people on LinkedIn. They have an email system that works internally on the website. Much like other popular social media platforms, LinkedIn has a way to contact anyone that you may think would be a beneficial addition to your team.

InMail allows you 2,000 characters to get your message across and make your point. Instead of typing one email and sending it to multiple candidates, it’s best to make it personal and specialize in each email for each candidate. This will also allow you to get to know your candidate and choose more wisely when selecting them.

I know it was mentioned that you had 2,000 characters to make your point, but it’s best to keep your message to about 100 words. In all reality, not many people like to read long, drawn-out job proposals. If you keep it short, concise, and to the point, you are more likely to get the responses you are looking for.

And to make things even simpler, LinkedIn has InMail analytics that can show your performance rate on your InMails and your response rate. If you seem to be doing better using a different template, they will tell you that too. This way, you can scrap the bad InMail messages, and use the template that is getting you more responses.

Think About Setting Up a Press Release

Press releases are an effective tool that you can set up through LinkedIn. They are an affordable way to advertise and spread your message to potential partners and employees. You can connect with an audience that has the same views and ideas that you have in mind for your company.

In doing so, it would be a good idea to print out pamphlets and send your viewers home with something they can hang on to and go over. If they take something home with them, then they are more likely to connect with you in the future.

Consider Making Some Recruitment Videos

Having some recruitment videos on your business profile could attract many potential candidates. Though the effort in making the videos is high, the payout could be even higher. There is nothing that people love more than a motivational video. Using this tactic could increase traffic on your page, expand your brand, and inspire people to want to work with you.

Videos are the window to your company. You can introduce your business to viewers, show them examples of your daily work and goals, express your company values, and sell them on the job. The best videos inspire drive and orient goals while keeping the company’s values and goals at the forefront.

LinkedIn Recruiter

Having a LinkedIn Recruiter account could give you major benefits when looking for candidates. While it is pricey, it gives you advanced tools that will let you search, organize, and contact candidates. It gives you a whopping 150 InMails a month and allows you to see full profiles.

If you don’t plan on hiring that many people so often, you could instead look into the LinkedIn Recruiter Lite version. This account is substantially cheaper and allows 30 InMail’s a month. You will be able to view full profiles if you have at least a 3rd-degree connection with the candidates and have access to advanced search tools. With this account, you can have 100 projects active on the account.

However, you won’t have access to a hiring manager, the Talent Pipeline, and you will only be allowed one seat per account. So, if you were planning on having some of your current employees do the hiring for you, I would set them up with the account instead.

What Not to Do When Recruiting on LinkedIn

It can be tough finding people that are the right fit for the job. And sometimes, when you do finally find someone, you might get a little too excited in reaching out to them. To keep things professional, here are a few things NOT to do when recruiting on LinkedIn.

Don’t Forget to Respond

When a candidate finds you through a post, be sure you don’t forget about them. You will want to keep up with replies and comments when they initiate contact. Additionally, try to reply in a timely manner. If you make them wait too long, they may lose interest and find another company to interact with.

Don’t Be Unprofessional

Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to comments is not everyone has the same knowledge you do. It would not help your cause if you put down or berate someone on your comments feed. Keep things professional and always remember that there is no such thing as a dumb question.

Don’t Post Off-Brand Content

I think what a lot of people forget in the business world is that their main goal is to serve. When someone opens a business, it is to provide new innovations or help spread their love for their brand and product. But at the end of the day, everything is about serving the customers.

This is especially important when sharing posts on your LinkedIn page. If you spam your own feed with promotions for your business, you won’t get the audience you will need to maintain values and build your brand. Always remember that your content is for other people, not yourself. Don’t try to serve yourself.

Don’t Seek Advice from Strangers

Whether this is in a group or on your main feed, don’t go around asking complete strangers for advice on a candidate. They don’t know you or your company values, so they won’t really be of any help to you. The same goes if the roles are reversed. If you were to give a complete stranger some bad advice, it will fall back to you and tarnish your brand name. So just remember to get to know these people before asking or giving advice.

Do Not Try to Gain Endorsements

Something that kind of goes along with not posting a ton of promotions on your page is not asking your connections to endorse you unless you know them personally. A connection is simply someone you may know mutually through someone else. This doesn’t mean you know them on a personal level, so it’s best to ask for endorsements from close friends and family, clients, and fellow business owners you know closely.

Don’t Add Connections to Your Email List

One of the biggest no-no’s you can do is adding your LinkedIn connections to your email list. This is the same idea as asking strangers for endorsements. Sending complete stranger’s promotional emails without their consent can get you into a pretty sticky situation. Not to mention, it’s just downright rude.

Understand Your Account is Meant to Be Seen

When it comes to your personal information, privacy is a must. But remember that LinkedIn is a platform that encourages involvement and making connections. It is really the only way you will be able to build your brand. Your information is available to those that you connect with. So, if there is anyone that you don’t want to see your information, delete them from your connections.

It is similar to how other social media platforms work, but on this one, you want your information public. At least for those that want to be involved in the business. And when it comes to revealing that information to people, the decision is completely up to you.

Message with Care

When you message potential candidates, try to keep it professional and pertinent. If you don’t have something to say that is informative or helpful, just don’t message them. Sending people spam is what you want to avoid. Because as soon as you start spamming people, they will cut you off.

Another message you want to avoid is the one about you knowing they viewed your account and knowing what they think. That is just unprofessional and unnecessary. If you want to take the opportunity to connect with them, then go for it. But usually, if someone views your account and doesn’t send a connection request, it’s because they aren’t interested.

The End Result is Valuable

When you use LinkedIn to recruit, you have a one-stop-shop for it all. It is a place to advertise your business, share your goals and values, connect with people that share those same goals and values, expand your brand, and find employees that meet the skill set you require and have the drive to help you build something.

The candidates you meet on LinkedIn are all filtered and so closely meet your qualifications that you may have a hard time choosing which one is the best fit. LinkedIn’s enhanced algorithms are sure to only deliver the best and most perfect fit.

When you make connections with these potential candidates, you will have a better insight into who they are and where their character aligns with your own. You will be able to make an educated and well thought out decision on who are the right people for your business.

In doing so, you only build your brands and make your message stronger and clearer than ever. By hiring the people that have the same ideals, it will only help your business thrive and overcome any obstacles. Employees hired through LinkedIn Recruiter will only enhance your cause and give you peace of mind that you have entrusted this work with the right person.

Now all you have to do is start. You have all of the information you need to build and create the perfect LinkedIn account to hire off of. You know what you want for your business and you know what you want to show the world through the people that work for you, so all you need to do is implement it on LinkedIn Recruiter. Before you know it, your brand will be built and your business will be thriving more than it ever has.