Today, LinkedIn is one of the biggest markets in the modern social recruiting landscape.
According to statistics collated by Linearty, roughly 50 million people use LinkedIn to search for jobs every week, and around 90 job applications are sent on the platform every minute.
While there’s clearly a lot of potential for businesses looking to fill their vacancies on LinkedIn, it’s also a fiercely competitive market where you’ll have to not only make your recruitment drives visible, but go the extra mile to stand out from other recruiters.
In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at four best practices for effective social recruiting on LinkedIn.
1. Get to Know Your Recruitment Pool
Just like a successful sales campaign, attracting the right candidates for your business needs to be informed by a detailed working knowledge of your ideal candidates.
As LinkedIn is a social network, it offers plenty of opportunity to research your target candidates, make your brand seen in the right places, and organize a recruitment drive that gets you the best talent possible.
Some of the best ways to research your potential candidates on LinkedIn include:
- Joining relevant industry groups where people share expertise and news, and join organic discussions or share high-value content that will encourage knowledgeable users to follow your business profile.
- Create your own group with a specific focus on the kind of specialism you’re looking to recruit to your business, and gain better control of the conversation to understand what people value in a potential employer.
- Interact with your current employees more often to encourage employee advocacy and attract other LinkedIn users to relevant conversations.
By interacting with your recruiting pool with these methods and more, you’ll soon be able to pick up on users’ values, interests, likes and dislikes, then work to tailor your future recruitment efforts based on these findings. Highperformr helps HR leaders and hiring managers run recruitment marketing campaigns on LinkedIn, with the help of customizable ‘we’re hiring’ templates, ready-to-use posts to announce hiring events, and other employer branding content to help with hiring on social media.
2. Share Job Postings and Relevant Content on Your Business Page
People’s LinkedIn feeds change quickly, and if you want to be seen among all the other potential recruiters, you need to make sure you’re maintaining a high-energy brand presence.
When you’re making plans for some social recruiting on LinkedIn, this means coming up with an engaging and varied content calendar template that will keep your brand top-of-mind for a large proportion of your recruitment pool.
This way, when you begin headhunting candidates or posting job openings, job hunters will have a frame of reference that will help them understand what kind of business you’re running, and whether the job is right for them.
There’s a variety of content that can help increase your reach during a social recruiting initiative, but some particularly useful activities include:
- Posting behind-the-scenes content that shows what everyday life at your company is like for employees.
- Sharing employee posts or testimonials that reflect positively on your company culture and work environment.
- Founder posts that talk about the next big step for your business and long-term plans for the company and opportunities for employees.
Like any kind of social media content, remember that it’s important not only to broadcast engaging information, but also engage by replying to comments and stimulating the conversation. For a clearer idea of your audience engagement on LinkedIn, be sure to check out our detailed and intuitive social media analytics platform!
3. Optimize Your Job Postings
It’s important to take your time drafting the listing content to ensure you’re not only promoting your company culture, but helping potential applicants to clearly understand the vacancy.
There’s no hard and fast rules to the way you compose your job openings, and you could see a lot of success by using a less conventional format to advertise to candidates.
Having said that, there are a few key elements that recruiters should consider to create an informative and attractive listing, including:
A compelling intro, where you give an overview of the role you’re recruiting for, the company, and the kind of projects your new recruit will be working on.
A ‘Responsibilities’ section, where you go into further detail about the tasks your new recruit will be performing on a day-to-day basis.
A ‘Requirements’ section, where you go into the minimum qualifications and experience that your new recruit will need to perform well in their position.
A ‘What We Offer’ section, where you’ll provide more detail about the kind of career progression candidates can expect, the employee benefits, and the features of the working environment that will make the job an attractive prospect to candidates.
Any relevant details about the recruitment process, such as a mock task or test. This can help to filter out applicants who aren’t all that interested in working for your company.
By hitting these key points and going the extra mile to write a compelling listing, you’ll be able to attract a higher caliber of candidate to your interview stages, while convincing the best talent on LinkedIn to apply for your opening, rather than your competitors’.
4. Maintain an Organized Shortlist
As LinkedIn is such a popular social recruiting market, you’re likely to get a high volume of applicants from any one posting. With so many potential candidates for a new position, it can be more than a little challenging to keep the recruitment process organized and prioritize your resources.
Coming up with a way to systematize your shortlist and assess potential candidates will help you make the most of your available time and resources, and make it easier to find the right person for the right position faster.
Some effective ways to create a more organized shortlist and rank potential candidates can include:
- Listing keywords that are closely related to the job you’re recruiting for, and organizing candidates based on whether or not their profiles feature these keywords.
- Minimum criteria for the length of time spent in a particular field or the kinds of projects a candidate has worked on, then assessing candidates’ listed experience against this.
- Checking quantifiable achievements in order to set benchmarks and measure candidates against them. For example, if you’re hiring a social media manager, and your initial list of applicants have achieved an average Instagram growth rate of 1.71% in their previous positions, you may want to set a policy of prioritizing candidates who have achieved growth rates at this level or higher.
- Checking candidates’ LinkedIn endorsements for relevant skills and experience, and prioritizing those who have received a higher amount of endorsements for relevant categories.
By using these kinds of clear, standardized criteria to organize your shortlist, you’ll make it easier for your hiring managers to prioritize call backs, and ensure a more productive, efficient interviewing stage.
Enhanced Social Recruiting
Successful social recruiting on LinkedIn comes with an array of different challenges to contend with, not least of all the sheer amount of competition for good talent.
However, by studying your recruitment pool, giving due diligence to your content and listings, and taking an organized approach to the interview stages, you’ll soon be able to maximize the potential of LinkedIn and find the ideal candidate for your next listing.
For more support with analyzing your social media audience and creating high-quality content, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
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