Find the Perfect Job Candidates With LinkedIn

Hiring the right employee is not always easy and it’s oftentimes time consuming. Also, when you have a small business, it can be difficult to attract talents as you don’t have a huge exposure and therefore people may simply not know about your company. And it’s even harder for businesses such as start-ups where specific and rare tasks are required. LinkedIn could then be of great help to find the perfect match. In this blog article, I’ll talk about how to use LinkedIn as a tool to recruit your new employees, with both free and paid options.

Use the search function with filters

This option will help you go through a list of LinkedIn users that correspond to different criteria you’ve selected. To get this list as precise as possible, simply write down in the search function the type of job position your company is looking for, such as “marketing manager” or “chemical engineer”. From there, filter by “people”. This will provide you with a list of LinkedIn users that have this specific job title. However, the people that will appear will not all be relevant to you. So you need to use other filters in order to target them more precisely. You can filter per industry, past companies, location, current company, schools attended, language and so on. Once you did that, look at the profiles that are suggested to you and see if there are any that could fit with your company. In case you do see some potential candidates, just send them a connection request with a simple message, asking if they are currently looking for a new job position and if they would be interested in you sending them the job description of the opened position.

Use LinkedIn Recruiter

This paid service available on LinkedIn allows you to search and target people using a lot more filters than the option mentioned earlier. Additionally to them, you can search per field of study, degree, seniority level, years at a company, years of experience, groups joined on LinkedIn and so on. LinkedIn will then generate a list of users that have the characteristics you filtered. From that point, you can then go one by one through each of the prospects and select the ones you’d like to keep and make the others ones disappear of your list. By giving a status to your prospects, such as “not contacted yet”, “contacted”, “screened” or “applied” you’ll be able to keep an overview of the recruitment easily. You can also save the list per project, which is useful if you’re looking to hire people for different jobs. When you think someone could be a good fit, then just as before, write him/her a message. Now, let’s talk about the downside. Even if it’s a great hiring management tool, it’s quite expensive. Therefore, if you have a small company, I wouldn’t really recommend using it, especially if you only hire new people very rarely.

Post a job

You can also simply post a job offer with the help of the feature “Post a job” under “LinkedIn business services”. LinkedIn will show the offer to users that could be interested in the open position. They will be able to see it when using the job function and they will also receive emails in their personal mailbox. In these emails, they can find a list of jobs currently available that companies posted on LinkedIn and which could fit with their profile. I recommend to post a job description of really good quality and with as many details as possible. It will help LinkedIn to target the right people. Posting job offers through this tool is however not for free and it works a little like ads, meaning you’ll have to fix which budget you are willing to pay per day so that users see the offer. If you’re not willing to pay for that, then check the next option below.

Write a regular post saying you are hiring

Write a post that your connections can see in their feed. Say that you are hiring and let people know a bit more about who you are looking for. Then add a link in your post that will direct users to the “job” section of your website for instance. Also add a call-to-action asking your connections to like and share your post. You can also ask your employees to share the post. That’s going to help their own connections to get a chance to see the job offer. While you’ll probably gain less visibility with a regular post than with the job posting tool mentioned above, this option is totally free and you can already gain quite a lot of visibility just by doing it this way. Also, don’t forget that the people following your company as well as the connections of your employees and yours are probably people of your industry. This means they could potentially be very interested in the job.

What’s your opinion on using LinkedIn to find job candidates? Have you already used this platform to hire someone? I’m curious to know your thoughts in the comments below.

In the meantime, don’t hesitate to check my previous blog posts and share them if you liked them!

• 6 Reasons Why You Should Use LinkedIn for Your Small Business
• Everything You Need to Know About LinkedIn Posts
• 10 Free Ways to Gain Visibility on LinkedIn
• Best Practices of Small Companies and Startups on LinkedIn
• Pros and Cons of Using LinkedIn Paid Ads for Small Companies and Start-ups
• 4 Life-Changing Tools To Become A LinkedIn Expert
• 6 Common Mistakes to Avoid on LinkedIn
• Hootsuite: A Very Useful Tool to Schedule and Monitor LinkedIn