🥷Actively Recruiting On LinkedIn: What Does This Tag Mean And How To Use It?

The “Actively recruiting on LinkedIn” tag means an organization on the platform is looking for new employees.

Pretty obvious, right?

You might have come across it – either as a recruiter or if you’re potentially looking at a new workplace.

Here’s what it looks like as a refresher.

For recruiters and human resources, the “actively recruiting” tag can be a great way to stand out and get more candidates to apply.

It’s a small detail, but think of it this way:

Your dream candidate could notice your listing because of the said tag and decide to apply because of that.

In other words, the small recruiting tag can be a great addition in the long run and there’s no reason to not want it.

But how do you actually get the tag to come up on your job listings and what are some other ways to get more candidates for your job listing?

We’ll cover that and more in this article.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• What does the “Actively Recruiting” tag on LinkedIn mean and how can I get it to show up for my job postings?
• What are the benefits of actively recruiting on LinkedIn.
• 5 Most effective ways to reach potential candidates on LinkedIn no matter your industry or job role.
• What templates to use if you’re focusing on active, outreach recruitment.

PS – Are you actively recruiting on LinkedIn?

Whether that’s the case or you’d like to reach out to ideal candidates on LinkedIn, you might want to join our private Facebook group – The LinkedIn Outreach Family. In it, we’re constantly sharing the latest growth-hacks, outreach strategies, and proven templates to get the most out of LinkedIn as a whole.

Now, let’s begin.

What Does Actively Recruiting On LinkedIn Tag Mean And How Does It Work?

First things first, what does actively recruiting mean on LinkedIn?

As mentioned above, the “Actively Recruiting” tag on LinkedIn is the green, little tag that indicates a company is still looking for new candidates.

Generally speaking, there are two types of recruitment techniques: Active recruiting and passive recruiting.

If you’re a recruiter on LinkedIn, ideally, you’ll want to be doing both. But in this guide, we’ll be focusing on actively recruiting on LinkedIn (we’ll also cover some benefits and practical steps below, so, be sure to keep on reading).

If a company is posting jobs to recruit candidates, chances are, they’re actively on the lookout for potential new hires.

Another possible way to actively recruit candidates is through LinkedIn outreach. Essentially, this is a form of headhunting in which you actively look for, filter, and reach out to potential candidates yourself.

Passive recruiting, meanwhile, involves a hiring manager or HR professional being open to potential candidates approaching them, but aren’t looking for applicants for a specific job.

Obviously, both of these methods of recruiting have their own pros and cons.

But if you’re looking for specific candidates with a specific set of skills, chances are, it’s going to be easier to reach out to them yourself.

This is something we’ll cover in detail below. With some best practices and templates to keep in mind as well.

But first, the next question you might be wondering when it comes to the Actively Recruiting LinkedIn tag.

How do I get the “Actively Recruiting” tag on LinkedIn?

Unfortunately, there is no quick button you can click on to turn on Actively Recruiting on your job listings.

The said tag is detected by LinkedIn’s algorithm. The idea is that if you are indeed actively recruiting, over time, the tag should appear automatically.

Similarly, if you’re wondering how to filter actively recruiting on LinkedIn – there is no way to do so as of now.

According to LinkedIn, the actively recruiting on LinkedIn tag comes from your recruiting activity from the past week. This is based on:

• Your responsiveness to applicants on LinkedIn.
• Your LinkedIn outreach to applicants via InMail (to show you’re actively recruiting on LinkedIn).

The LinkedIn actively recruiting tag eligibility is determined by the algorithm. So, if you want to obtain the tag, your best bet is to follow the above 2 steps LinkedIn recommends.

What Are The Benefits Of Actively Recruiting On LinkedIn?

According to a LinkedIn study, 95 job applicants are submitted through LinkedIn every second, and 3 people are hired every minute.

No doubt, LinkedIn is the best place for recruiters and HR professionals to find ideal candidates.

Done right, you gain the following benefits when actively recruiting on LinkedIn:

• You can find the right people, fast. This is useful if you’re actively recruiting and need applicants fast, instead of waiting for them to find you.
• You gain LinkedIn profile suggestions similar to your ideal candidates.
• You can scrape LinkedIn searches and potential candidates to actively reach them and save time.
• You can use LinkedIn InMails when actively recruiting to reach your candidates personally.
• And finally, you can pay for LinkedIn Recruiter to make recruiting easier.

1. Finding the right people fast

With over 875 million members across 200+ countries on LinkedIn, it’s easy to see why it’s the #1 platform for recruitment.

Done right, you can severely cut down your hiring time through LinkedIn advertising, advanced search filters, and by engaging with the world’s most qualified talent pool.

For example, you can use operators such as AND, NOT, OR, quotation marks, and parentheses for advanced search criteria.

Regardless of your niche, this can be a great way to track down ideal candidates on LinkedIn using the LinkedIn X-ray search.

Essentially, you can find ideal candidates on LinkedIn this way, reach out, and let them know you’re actively recruiting. 

Instead of waiting for them to find you.

This can be a great way to save time and as you’ll see below, you can also automate this part.

2. Similar LinkedIn profile suggestions

Once you do find a potential candidate, LinkedIn automatically recommends other relevant profiles and candidates to help you fill roles quickly.

 

Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can use even more advanced search filters, such as:

• Keyword searches.
• Company size.
• Group membership.
• Company type.
• Job opportunities.
• Profile language.
• And more.

Once you find your list of candidates, you can also use the “view similar profile” feature to expand your search even more.

Another thing to consider if you’re interested in scaling your company is LinkedIn Recruiter. 

We’ll cover this more below, so, be sure to read on.

3. Scraping LinkedIn searches and potential candidates to save time

One of the best things about using LinkedIn for active recruitment is that there are many different ways you can approach your candidates and search results.

For example, once you create a detailed LinkedIn search to find a list of people who would be ideal for your job role, you can then scrape all those profiles to reach out to them via other means such as email or LinkedIn InMails.

Alternatively, if you have a huge list of profiles and reaching out to them one-by-one sounds too time-consuming, you can also use LinkedIn automation to set up outreach flows for you.

All in all, this makes your recruitment much more efficient in the long run. Especially if you don’t have to write the same connection request message hundred times.

And by the end of this guide, you’ll have a much better idea of how to execute this from start to finish.

4. LinkedIn InMails to cut through the noise

LinkedIn InMail messages are a premium feature that allows you to directly message people on the platform you’re not connected to.

They’re ideal for recruitment as well as lead generation.

Because they work just like emails, you can customize your outreach templates and messaging to reflect your purpose for writing.

And by including a relevant subject line, you can grab their attention immediately and let them know what your message is about (e.g. if you’re recruiting for a specific job role).

When writing InMails, you should:

• Keep it personal, relevant, and personalized. 
• Make sure you’re contacting the right person (i.e. you know they’re looking for new opportunities).
• Experiment with different subject lines, lengths, and recruitment angles.
  

If you’re actively recruiting on LinkedIn and doing outreach, you can use InMails to message someone directly. Even if you’re not connected.

5. LinkedIn Recruiter to hire candidates at scale

LinkedIn Recruiter is an all-encompassing hiring platform to find, connect with, and engage professionals faster at scale.

To be more practical, LinkedIn Recruiter is an outbound recruiting approach as it’ll help you approach ideal candidates with a filtered search.

With the filtered search, you can check a candidate’s job title, location, skills, and other relevant keywords. Then, you can prioritize or save searches to a project to collaborate with your organization (e.g. other HR professionals, CEO, etc.).

Additionally, you can also manage and track your recruitment efforts with its built-in analytics tool which essentially lets you know how your campaign is performing.

Depending on your needs, LinkedIn Recruiter can cost you around $99.95 per month (Lite version) or $825 per month (Corporate plan).

For more info, see what’s the difference between different LinkedIn account types.

If you’re actively recruiting on LinkedIn, should you use LinkedIn Recruiter? 

Depends on your size. For most businesses, the price tag will be out of their budget, especially when you can simply use automation to contact your applicants or run ads.

So, let’s take a look at an alternative and what you can do ihen recruiting on LinkedIn.

The Most Effective Ways To Reach Potential Candidates Through LinkedIn

To recap so far, when using LinkedIn for recruitment, you can focus on inbound or outbound recruiting. In other words, if candidates will come to you or you’ll reach out to candidates yourself.

In short, if you’re on LinkedIn actively recruiting, you should create an optimized job posting first. And if you want to quickly hire someone, you should also be doing outreach as well.

Let’s take a look at each method to get the most ut of LinkedIn recruiting.

1. Create, optimize, and share your LinkedIn recruitment job posts

Pretty obvious, right? 

But this is probably one of the best ways to attract ideal candidates. Especially if you optimize your job posting title, description, skills required, and other related information. 

To stand out and attract your ideal employee, make sure your job description aligns with your brand values so that your LinkedIn followers will want to apply as soon as you share your job posts.

Alternatively, simply look up similar positions you’re recruiting for to see what other companies are focusing on.

Use relevant keywords, look at their requirements, and benefits to see what you can improve on.

2. Consider LinkedIn ads 

LinkedIn ads aren’t just for marketers. 

Recruiters can use different types of LinkedIn ads to target the right people with information about their company and open roles. With recruitment ads, you can run job ads, spotlight ads, follower ads, sponsored content, and more. 

What makes this option ideal for recruiters is that you can target people based on job title, seniority, skills, school, years of experience, and more.

3. Use LinkedIn private mode when actively recruiting on LinkedIn and doing outreach

If you don’t want your prospects to get the notification that you visited their profile, you should turn on LinkedIn private mode to stay anonymous. 

To do so, go to LinkedIn Settings & Privacy, select ‘Profile viewing options’, and switch to private mode.

When you’re creating a list of potential candidates to reach out to, it’s better to not give it away that you’re going to message them – it’ll spoil the surprise.

This is a great way to shortlist candidates, learn more about their past experience, and get an overview of who should advance to the next step of the application.

4. Encourage referrals

This works best if you don’t have a huge following or the advertising budget to boost your reach.

To encourage referrals and word-of-mouth recommendations, consider listing a financial reward in your job posting.

This can help attract top talent, reduce costs on advertising, and create a positive culture. Overall, employees hired through referrals tend to stay longer as well.

This is simple to execute as well.

In your job listing, simply include a note that if the reader knows someone else who might be relevant for the position more, they’ll get a financial reward for referring the right person.

5. Use automation

Last but not least, this is what I mentioned above and what’s worked for us best – without boosting our advertising budget or spending months growing our LinkedIn following.

For this, you’ll need an automation tool like Expandi to do your outreach for you. Essentially, Expandi takes your LinkedIn search results (whether it’s the free one or from Sales Navigator) and automates sending connection requests, follow-ups, InMails if needed, and more.

Here’s how we managed to get a 74.2% reply rate and hired 3 new ideal SDRs on LinkedIn using automation:

1. Go to Expandi.
2. From there, you need to set up a Connector Campaign in Expandi to start sending connection requests and follow-ups.
   In the Campaigns tab select Connector Campaign.
3. Enter a name for the campaign.
4. Continue with a template and messaging sequence.
5. Create your messages (we’ll show the templates below)
6. Go to the “People” tab and click “Add new search”
7. Choose the “Sales navigator search”
8. Enter the name of your campaign and click the Next button.
9. Then go to Linkedin Search Navigator and create a detailed search on LinkedIn for our ideal candidate based on their job title, geography, current company headcount, vertical, and keywords in their profile.
10. Scrape the search results from LinkedIn. To do that, copy the LinkedIn search URL.
11.  Go back to Expandi and Paste the URL that you copied from Sales Navigator. Keep in mind that only 2500 people will be imported into your account at once because of LinkedIn’s limit.
    
    
12.  Click on Search and wait until all of the LinkedIn accounts are added to your search. 
    
13. That’s it. You can activate your campaign.

To recap, this step can be most effective when actively recruiting on LinkedIn because:

• It’s cheaper than LinkedIn Recruiter.
• You see results faster.
• It’s easier than running LinkedIn ads.

And overall, you have more control over your entire recruiting process.

You never know when you’re going to receive the ‘actively recruiting on LinkedIn’ tag, if you’re going to receive it at all. 

Because it’s based on the algorithm.

This way, you’re taking measures into your own hands instead. 

Now, if you’re doing outreach recruitment, here are some proven templates you can use that worked for us.

Outreach Recruiting On LinkedIn: What Templates To Use

Message #1 – 1 hour after connecting

“Thanks for accepting {first_name}! I noticed you work as a {job_title}. Are you interested in a new opportunity? I’m building out our Sales Team at Expandi – and we’re looking for a Sales Development Representative. Let me know if you’re interested in learning more about the role? We’ve been on an insane journey bootstrapping to $6M ARR in just 18 months exclusively inbound. Over 2022 our goal is to grow to $10M in ARR and our outbound sales team will be a big driver to help us achieve that! Look forward to hearing from you – {Signature}”

Message #2 – 2 days after

“Hey {first_name} – Thought I’d send you a quick ping to see if you caught my last note?”

Message #3 – 2 days after

“Signing off after this {first_name} – Not to worry if you’re currently not interested in a new opportunity 🙂 Out of interest, let me know if you know anyone who might be interested in the role? Keep in touch – {Signature}”

Though the GIF in this outreach is an optional step, it can be a great way to stand out. 

To learn how to use dynamic GIFs in your outreach, check out how image GIF personalization works.

Conclusion

Hopefully, by now, you have a better understanding on what does actively recruiting mean on LinkedIn.

Though the “actively recruiting” LinkedIn tag can help, it’s not exactly reliable, since you have to wait for the algorithm to flag your job posting with it.

Alternatively, you can take action into your own hands and reach out to candidates yourself.

If you’re short on time and need to recruit fast, the latter is arguably a more efficient approach.

And then, if you also add automation into the mix, you’ll be saving a lot of time not writing the same connection requests and follow-up messages one by one.

Ready to get the most out of LinkedIn using automation?

Get started with a free, 7-day Expandi trial now!

Or, if you have more questions on using LinkedIn automation for recruitment, be sure to join our Facebook group The LinkedIn Outreach Family. We’ll be sure to help you out if you need any direction!