How to Maximize LinkedIn as a Recruiting Platform (For Employers)

In any organization, filling in vacant positions is a top priority.

All hiring managers and business leaders know that.

The longer a vacancy remains unfilled, the more negative an impact it has across various sectors of your business.

That includes your company’s productivity, team morale, and of course, overall financial expenditure.

The stats speak for themselves.

Based on statistics shared by Solutions Driven, a company loses an average of £400 for every day that a vacancy goes unfilled.

Therefore, for obvious reasons, Human Resources professionals feel a sense of urgency to onboard talent as soon as possible.

To satisfy this need to hire, LinkedIn has grown by leaps and bounds to become a go-to job hunting and recruitment platform.

Today, there is no excuse as to why employers shouldn’t be leveraging this social media channel for what it’s worth.

In this blog post, we’ll go through the best ways in which you can take advantage of LinkedIn for recruiting top talent.

Let’s dive right in.

Why is LinkedIn a Great Recruitment Platform

Linkedin is the largest social media platform for professional networking and career development.

According to stats shared by the channel, approximately 675 million users have registered accounts on the platform.

These LinkedIn members are located in over 200 countries all across the world.

But that’s not all: the same report indicates LinkedIn has recorded a signup rate of around two new members per second.

It’s clear that the social network is cementing its spot as the leading space for professionals to connect.

What’s more, with so much talent teeming in one place, it’s only natural for employers to restrategize how they secure their own staff by making the most of what LinkedIn has to offer.

At present, LinkedIn stats show that over 50M companies have registered business accounts via their platform.

Together, these 50M companies have over 20M job offers open right now alone.

That doesn’t account for the billions of job vacancies that have been posted and removed by these companies once they’ve acquired a suitable candidate via the social media platform.

To top it all off, not only is it the top spot that potential new hires frequent, but recruiters have also found success onboarding those they need via LinkedIn.

Kinsta shared that 35.5M LinkedIn talents have been hired by a company through the platform.

Some Human Resources professionals may feel that the hiring rate is minuscule when the same stats indicate that 122M onboarders received interviews through LinkedIn.

However, we must remember that those 122M interview invitations can be accounted for in several ways. For example, an employer may have interviewed multiple candidates before making their decision.

What’s conclusive is that 90% of recruiters already use LinkedIn, and so should you.

However, one thing is to use LinkedIn as a recruiting platform. The other is to use it well.

Let’s talk about how you can do that.

Recruiting on LinkedIn: Active vs Passive Recruiting

Before we get into the best ways to use LinkedIn as a recruiting platform, we need to highlight the importance of understanding active and passive recruiting.

Active recruiting refers to the energetic efforts you make to engage the right candidates for openings within your organization.

This takes various forms, such as:

• Searching for candidates that use LinkedIn
• Reaching out to stand out top talent
• Conducting background research on tentative candidate profiles

On the other end of the spectrum is passive recruiting. Unlike active recruiting, this type of onboarding strategy involves waiting for the talent pool to come to you with little to no effort on your part to put yourself out there.

A typical example of passive recruiting is posting a new job ad, complete with job title and a full job description, on your LinkedIn profile without taking the initiative to draw attention to the vacancy. You're relying on your employer brand to catch their eye.

Similarly, we categorize the candidates who may or may not respond when you post a job ad as either passive or active candidates.

Active candidates are those who seek new opportunities or are ready to start working on your project immediately.

Passive candidates are those who are open to working with you yet cannot do so due to current responsibilities or obligations. For instance, a professional who is employed when you reach out to them but is still interested in making the switch to your organization would be called a passive candidate.

Getting a comprehensive understanding of these categories is crucial to developing a winning strategy for LinkedIn marketing as an employer.

Let’s take a closer look at the tactics that you can incorporate to make the most out of LinkedIn recruiting:

1. Targeting Passive Candidates

One of the best ways to magnify your recruiting efforts on LinkedIn is to not discard potential partnerships with passive candidates. This is particularly important as 73% of job seekers on LinkedIn are considered passive candidates.

However, despite the fact that these candidates are already taken, not all hope is lost. If you submit a compelling offer to them, they may find that the grass is greener on your side of the pond.

Using your company profile, conduct a search for possible job candidates and get in touch with them. To make this process easier, you can utilize the Linkedin Recruiter feature which allows you to filter search results and integrate a tracking system for specific queries.

In addition to that, personalize your outreach efforts and inmail messages to suit each candidate and encourage interest on their part for your organization.

2. Being Proactive

Zoning in on passive candidates implies the need to be an active employer. The two go hand in glove.

As a hiring professional, you need to take the initiative to augment your reach and connect with as many talented candidates as you can.

A good strategy is to leverage keywords as you scout for talent via an advanced search. Several LinkedIn members optimize their profiles with keywords that coincide with those that match the intent of a company.

Do some keyword research and analysis to figure out what types of searches you should be conducting to increase the number of new opportunities for securing talented professionals.

3. Practice Talent Pooling

In conjunction with targeting passive candidates, hiring employers must integrate potential candidates in a talent pool.

This refers to creating a shortlist of those tentative professionals who catch your eye and seem like great fits for your business.

As you go along reaching out to candidates, don’t discard those that are unavailable. Instead, compile them into a group that you engage with periodically.

You can achieve this by using different marketing campaigns that orient that talent pool around your company.

In doing so, whenever vacancies pop up, you already have a batch of potential candidates that you can tap into in order to speed up your recruiting efforts.

4. Connecting With Previous Employees

While keeping in touch with prospective candidates about future job openings is a wise decision, a strategy that is equally as viable is maintaining healthy relationships with former employees. In as much as onboarding new talent can be an attractive option, bringing back someone who already knows how to do the job will save you time and money on training and productivity. This is because they are already familiar with both the types of projects associated with your business as well as the work culture at your organization. Therefore, ensure that you keep in contact with professionals who have produced quality work for you.

5. Checking Your Employees’ Connections

Hiring employers know that the candidates that they connect with also have professionals that they are in contact with on their LinkedIn profiles. Some of these connections are like-minded talents who operate within the same niche as the candidates that you are in touch with.

While your candidates might be tentative prospects for recruiting, their connections may also prove to be interesting partnerships for your organization.

Snoop around and see who your candidates are connected to. When you come across someone who fits the profile you’re looking for, add them to your talent pool and nurture those leads.

For all you know, they may turn into solid additions to your business’s team.

6. Pay Attention To Candidates’ LinkedIn Pages

When using LinkedIn as a recruitment platform, a user’s LinkedIn page provides you with a wealth of knowledge about them.

That encompasses their skills, peer testimonials, endorsements, years of experience, qualifications, and interesting tidbits about their lives. All of these elements constitute useful insight that helps you to create a holistic profile of that candidate.

These are the kinds of details that give you an idea of how those talents will perform within your organization: be sure to bear them in mind whenever you screen for the right candidates.

LinkedIn: Alternative Solutions For Recruiting

The strategies highlighted above make up the foundation of successful recruiting on LinkedIn.

Hiring professionals need to incorporate them into their hiring plan when searching for new talent to bring into their companies.

Having said that, we understand that doing so is not easy.

Successfully balancing all the facets of human resource management is a Herculean task that is managed by a select few.

There are just too many metrics to bear in mind when handling this type of recruitment practice.

That, and the possibility of losing £400 for each day your vacancy goes unfilled places tremendous pressure on you that doesn’t make the job any easier.

For that reason, some hiring professionals need an ulterior method of solving their LinkedIn recruitment strategy dilemma.

We’ll tell you about how Jobheron helps these types of hiring employers to onboard talent on LinkedIn.

Increase Your Candidate Scope with JobHeron

JobhHeron is a firm and service provider whose primary focus is to make the hassle of recruiting simpler for hiring employers so that they can accelerate the rate at which they access talent.

The company was created in 2015 by its founder and CEO Ben Durrant, a recruiter with over 20 years of experience.

He leads a team that offers a host of services to employers including CV filtering, job board coverage, and job application tracking services.

What’s more, Jobheron also features databases that house over 10 million CVs from candidates across the UK.

A partnership with Jobheron is a sure way to get your LinkedIn hiring strategy the help it needs.

Our team fast-tracks your scouting efforts to secure talented professionals that match your criteria.

In doing so, you can utilise the time you’d spend on recruiting and reinvest it in other areas of your Human Resources management.

Jumpstart Your LinkedIn Recruiting Today

Talent Now shared that top candidates are only available for 10 days before they’re snatched away by another recruiter.

Don’t let the burdens and complexities of LinkedIn recruiting cause you to miss out on the right talent for your business.

Trust Jobheron with your outreach on this social media platform: we secure your talent before someone else does.

Give us a call at 0203 745 3552 or send us an email at enquires@jobheron.co.uk.

Can’t wait to get started with you.