So, you want to hire people through LinkedIn.
Then you’ve come to the right place.
With well over 760+ million users on the platform, you can find just about anyone on LinkedIn to reach out to and recruit.
Whether it’s for your SaaS agency or you’re just looking for a web developer for a short-term project, LinkedIn is going to be your best choice for hiring people.
In this guide, we’re going to cover everything you need to know about using LinkedIn for recruitment and give you 5 tips to make sure you hire the best employee.
And in the end, we’ll reveal our secret hiring hack to show you how we found the perfect Scrum Master using Expandi.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- LinkedIn Recruiter Vs LinkedIn Talent Hub – What You Need to Know
- Top 5 Hiring Tips to Find the Best Employee Through LinkedIn
Let’s begin!
Table of Contents
LinkedIn Recruiter Vs LinkedIn Talent Hub – What You Need to Know
When it comes to using LinkedIn for recruitment, you’ve got 2 main options:
- LinkedIn Recruiter – Hiring platform that helps find, connect with and manage the people you want to recruit.
- LinkedIn Talent Hub – Applicant tracking system (ATS) that lets you hire, manage, and outsource all in one platform.
Sounds confusing and not sure which one is right for you?
Essentially, LinkedIn Recruiter is an outbound recruiting approach as you’ll be reaching out to your ideal candidates following a filtered search.
And LinkedIn Talent Hub is for inbound recruiting. Meaning, candidates will be filling in your job ad and you’ll have to select the best employee to contact.
Let’s take a look at how the two differ in more detail.
LinkedIn Recruiter: Outbound recruiting
What’s LinkedIn Recruiter?
It’s a hiring platform for professionals, HR managers, and talent recruiters that helps you find, manage, and contact the ideal candidates for your team.
In a way, LinkedIn Recruiter is like LinkedIn Sales Navigator but for recruiting people.
Like Sales Navigator, it also offers an advanced LinkedIn keyword search, with Booleans and advanced search filters, to help you find the right employee.
With this, the platform aims to save you time in finding the right person and engage the world’s most qualified talent pool for your recruitment purposes.
Once you find your list of candidates through its search filter, you can connect with them using personalized InMails (even if you don’t have their contact information). Or to speed up the process, you can use bulk messaging and saved templates to reach out to more candidates even faster.
Once you run a filtered search for your potential employees using their job title, location, skills and other keywords, LinkedIn Recruiters offers a potential talent pool you can prioritize or save to a project.
Then, you prioritize candidates and narrow in on people who are more likely to respond. As in, those who’ve indicated they’re open to new job opportunities, have engaged with your brand, or match your requirements.
Using LinkedIn Recruiter, you get 150 InMail messages per month per team member to contact any candidate.
And finally, you can also easily manage and track your recruitment efforts with LinkedIn’s powerful analytics tool. This lets you better keep track of the people you reached out to, who replied, who didn’t, and so on.
This way, you’ll know how your campaign is performing and if there are any changes you’ll need to make.
Other LinkedIn Recruiter features include:
- Advanced search and AI-based recommendations to find the ideal candidate.
- Applicant tracking system (ATS) integrations
- The option to work with your team and share profiles and projects.
In short, LinkedIn Recruiter is ideal for people working in HR or if you’re looking to find THE ideal candidate for in-house and long-term work. With Recruiter, you get a list of potential candidates and reach out to them yourself. And if you’re a talent recruiter, you can even save searches and share profiles with your team members to get a second opinion.
Depending on your needs, LinkedIn Recruiter can cost you around $99.95 per month (Lite version) or $825 per month (Corporate plan).
You can read more about LinkedIn Recruiter here.
We offer a cheaper LinkedIn recruitment solution with more features below – so keep on reading.
LinkedIn Talent Hub: Inbound recruiting
Essentially, LinkedIn Talent Hub is an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) that lets your handle all of your recruitment needs in one single platform.
Meaning, if you’ve been using too many recruitment tools to manage your applicants and their applications, LinkedIn Talent Hub will help you get insights throughout your hiring process just from one app.
With Talent Hub, you get a pipeline of people who applied for your job ad, and through the tool, you can narrow down the candidates until you find your dream employee.
First, you fill in and post your job details. Talent Hub helps you by providing descriptions based on millions of other job postings.
Then, after posting a job ad and candidates fill it in, you get an overview of employees ready to source.
You can share top candidates with your hiring team so they can review and provide feedback.
And once you find someone who fits the bill, you can start scheduling interviews.
Other LinkedIn Talent Hub features include:
- Real-time data and insights.
- Effortless collaboration with your hiring team
- Seamless communication using Google and Outlook email integrations.
- Integration with other external HR and recruitment tools.
- And more.
With LinkedIn Talent Hub, it’s easier to keep track of candidates who’ve filled in your job ad and narrow down your options.
Unlike Recruiter, potential employees will be coming to you instead of the other way around.
So, if you already have a decent company following on LinkedIn and know people will be glad to work with you, LinkedIn Talent Hub is the better option for you.
Read more about LinkedIn Talent Hub here.
To obtain current pricing for Talent Hub, you’ll have to contact LinkedIn directly.
Now, let’s discuss the best recruitment tips to help you find the best employees and one other hiring solution you might want to keep in mind when using LinkedIn for recruitment.
Top 5 Hiring Tips to Find the Best Employee Through LinkedIn
LinkedIn has the potential to be a great recruitment tool for sourcing employees.
And the best part is you can find almost anyone with the skills you’re looking for.
Here are 5 useful hiring tips for recruiters using LinkedIn:
1. Create and share job posts
Sounds obvious, right?
Maybe.
But recruiters sometimes get lost with trying to craft the perfect InMail message they skip out on this simple step.
Creating a job post on LinkedIn is free and you even have the option to boost it with your advertising budget if you want to increase your reach.
Within the job post itself, you should cover all the essentials – title, description, skills required, and so on.
But aside from that, you also need to stand out.
You want to attract the ideal employee. To do that, make sure your job description aligns with your brand values so that your loyal LinkedIn followers will want to apply as soon as you share your job posts.
This is especially the case if you have a hefty number of followers on LinkedIn and you’re constantly growing your company LinkedIn page.
In that case, sometimes, sharing a job post might be all it takes to attract the best employee.
But if that’s not the case, here’s what you can do instead:
2. Consider LinkedIn InMails
The LinkedIn InMail is LinkedIn’s version of email built natively on their channel.
If you have a free LinkedIn account, you can only send connection requests or direct messages if you’re already connected.
But with InMails, you can bypass all that and send a direct message to a potential candidate’s inbox.
InMails are ideal for recruitment as well as lead generation.
Because they work just like emails, you can customize your 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.
When writing InMails, you should always:
- Keep it personal, relevant, and personalized. After all, what’s the point of sending a recruitment message to someone who’s already working, right?
- Make sure you’re contacting the right person. You can learn a lot about potential candidates by conducting a free background check, as well as analyzing their personal profile information (summary, skills, etc.).
- Experiment with different subject lines, length and recruitment angle.
To use LinkedIn InMails, you need to upgrade to a premium account which can cost you anywhere from $29.99 per month to $119.95 per month. And depending on the number of InMails you’ll want to send per month, you might have to pay extra.
This can add up quickly. Continue reading to learn how we found a Scrum Master using LinkedIn automation below.
3. Use LinkedIn private mode
Private mode is exactly what it sounds like.
If you don’t want your prospects to get a notification that you visited their profile, you should turn this option on to stay anonymous.
To do so, go to LinkedIn Settings & Privacy, select ‘Profile viewing options’, and switch to private mode.
The idea here is that you don’t want your potential candidates to get a notification that an HR recruiter was going through their profile (it’s going to be a surprise!).
Instead, you should gather a list of candidates and their strong suits using private mode.
Then, once you have enough information, you can reach out to them directly or send an InMail.
4. Encourage referrals
This works best if you don’t have a huge following or the advertising budget to shell out on reaching hundreds of people.
Instead, you can use this to your advantage and encourage word-of-mouth referrals.
Organizations that have effective referral programs can reach over 50% of all hires from referrals.
They can also attract top talent, reduce costs on advertising, and create a positive culture. Employees hired through referrals tend to stay with a company longer as well.
The best recruitment referral program is a financial reward.
So, in your job ad, you can include a note that if the reader knows someone else who might be suited for the position better, they’ll get a financial reward for referring to the employee.
5. Use automation
Last but not least, this recruitment tip is what worked for us without having to shell out on our advertising budget or spending months growing our LinkedIn following.
Instead, we used advanced LinkedIn dynamic personalization to reach out to a list of candidates with a funny, out of the box recruitment message.
Here’s how:
First, we set up a simple Sales Navigator search for a Scrum Master in our region to find a list of relevant candidates.
Then, we used LinkedIn automation (Expandi) and through the Hyperise integration we leveraged hyper personalization by using dynamic GIFs that stood out in our candidate’s inbox.
Here’s the image we created that grabbed the profile picture and the first name from our candidate’s LinkedIn profile:
Imagine receiving a wanted poster image with your profile picture on it directly in your inbox. Talk about an attention grabber!
Turns out, a lot of people were impressed and wanted to know more!
Eventually, it was only a matter of time until we found the right fit…
Wondering how you can start using hyper personalization in your LinkedIn outreach to hire the best employee like this?
Check out the full Expandi Hyperise integration page for more info and details on how to set up a similar campaign.
Conclusion
Did you know you can use Expandi for recruitment as well as lead generation?
Unlike LinkedIn Recruiter, you can use LinkedIn automation to automate your outreach for many different objectives and strategies.
We’ve used it to distribute our ebook, book meetings on autopilot, and even come up with an omnichannel outreach by integrating it with an email marketing tool of our choice.
Through clever outreach targeting and relevant templates, we’ve even achieved an 82% acceptance rate and a 70% response rate to follow-ups.
Ready to get similar results and take your LinkedIn recruitment to the next level?
Get started using Expandi now.
And if you’re looking for more resources on LinkedIn marketing, also check out:
