In short, yes, HR professionals regularly use LinkedIn to source and vet candidates during the recruitment process. LinkedIn has become an invaluable tool for recruiters and hiring managers to identify potential job seekers who match open positions and evaluate their skills, experiences, and professional networks.
How Do Recruiters Use LinkedIn?
Here are some of the key ways HR and recruiters leverage LinkedIn to aid their hiring efforts:
- Searching for candidates based on job titles, skills, companies, locations, schools, and other keywords. LinkedIn provides powerful search functionality to pinpoint prospects.
- Posting and promoting job listings that get shared across candidates’ networks organically.
- Browsing group discussions and comments to identify engaged professionals who might be passive candidates.
- Using LinkedIn Recruiter to message prospects, see limited profile views, and automate the sourcing process.
- Proactively connecting with potential candidates to develop relationships well before actively recruiting.
- Vetting and verifying candidates’ work histories, education, credentials, recommendations, and endorsements.
- Reaching out to shared connections to get referrals and learn more about candidates off the record.
- Researching candidates’ company, role, and industry experience to gauge cultural and technical fit.
In summary, LinkedIn enables recruiters to scale, simplify, and enhance their talent search and screening. It provides a central hub to search profiles, make connections, post jobs, and evaluate applicants in one place.
Why Do Recruiters Rely on LinkedIn?
There are several key reasons why LinkedIn has become recruiters’ go-to talent sourcing resource:
- Reach: With over 740 million members as of 2021, LinkedIn provides instant access to the world’s largest professional network and candidate database.
- Candidate information: Rich, detailed LinkedIn profiles showcase skills, job histories, accomplishments, education, certifications, recommendations, and more.
- Engagement: Candidates tend to keep their LinkedIn profiles up-to-date and check them regularly, making it a highly proactive platform.
- Targeting: Recruiters can drill down their searches based on unlimited criteria to pinpoint niche, active candidates.
- Credibility: Candidates with established LinkedIn profiles tend to be more serious professionals with digital professional brand and presence.
- Competition: Viewing competitors’ talent pools and activity provides valuable insider intelligence.
- Tools: LinkedIn Recruiter and Jobs provide robust technology to manage the hiring process from end-to-end.
In short, nothing comes close to matching LinkedIn in terms of talent reach, data, targeting, and end-to-end hiring functionality. It has become the go-to channel for sourcers, recruiters, and employers looking to connect with top talent in any industry or location.
What Candidate Information Do Recruiters Look For?
When evaluating potential candidates on LinkedIn, here are some of the key profile elements recruiters look for:
- Summary: Recruiters look for career summaries that sell candidates’ value prop, skills, and goals aligned with the role.
- Experience: Strong work histories at reputable companies indicate stability, growth, and reliable references.
- Education: Degrees and certifications from quality institutions validate candidates’ foundational knowledge.
- Accomplishments: Achievements, awards, promotions, publications, and projects provide hard evidence of success.
- Recommendations: Genuine recommendations and endorsements build credibility and reveal strengths.
- Connections: Mutual ties and large, relevant networks help validate candidates’ professional reputation.
- Engagement: Active participation in industry groups and forums is a plus for identifying passionate workers.
Additionally, recruiters look at profile completeness, consistency, writing quality, and professionalism. They use LinkedIn profile data to assess skills, cultural fit, motivations, and more.
How Do Recruiters Connect with Candidates?
Once recruiters have identified promising potential hires on LinkedIn, they have several options for making connections:
- Send InMail messages directly through LinkedIn.
- Comment or like candidates’ posts or articles to start a conversation.
- Request to connect by sending a personalized note highlighting common ground.
- Look for shared group memberships as a networking opportunity.
- Leverage existing first-degree connections for a warm introduction.
- Reference candidates’ work, posts, or background as an icebreaker.
- Use Premium Recruiter tools like candidate bookmarks, notes, and directly importing profiles into applicant tracking systems.
The key is taking the time to make meaningful, personalized connections tailored to each candidate’s background and interests. This helps build initial rapport and gets recruiters on candidates’ radar early in the process.
What Recruiting Challenges Does LinkedIn Help Solve?
LinkedIn helps hiring professionals overcome many long-standing recruiting obstacles, including:
- High competition for top talent: LinkedIn levels the playing field and helps source from a much wider pool of prospects.
- Passive candidates: Features like Recruiter allow engaging prospects not actively searching.
- Niche talent needs: Advanced search makes finding specialized, highly skilled workers much easier.
- Diversity goals: Focusing searches by location, background, skills, and more helps remove unconscious bias.
- Remote hiring: LinkedIn enables sourcing globally distributed or remote workforces.
- Budget constraints: The platform is very cost-effective compared to traditional recruiting methods.
- Speed: Automated tools accelerate previously time-consuming tasks like sourcing and screening.
LinkedIn cannot fully replace traditional recruiting approaches like career sites, job boards, networking events, college recruiting, and employee referrals. However, it makes the process far more efficient, targeted, and cost-effective.
What Steps Do Recruiters Take on LinkedIn?
While every recruiter uses LinkedIn a bit differently, most follow a process like this:
- Research the role’s requirements and ideal candidate attributes.
- Perform targeted searches and apply filters to identify best-match prospects.
- Bookmark interesting profiles and take notes on them for future reference.
- Make contact through InMail, connecting, commenting, sharing content, etc.
- Evaluate prospects’ responses and interest level in the role.
- Schedule initial phone screens for promising candidates.
- Leverage networks for back-channel references and due diligence.
- Track candidate status and maintain relationships for future roles.
This allows systematically sourcing, screening, and engaging candidates to uncover great fits. The key is approaching LinkedIn in a methodical way with purpose and consistency.
What Tools Do Recruiters Use?
In addition to LinkedIn’s basic free tools, recruiters often use the following premium features:
- Recruiter Lite or Recruiter: Paid versions unlock more advanced searching, InMail, candidate management and collaboration tools.
- LinkedIn Jobs: Lets organizations post roles, accept and review applications, and track candidates.
- LinkedIn Elevate: Share job posts and candidate searches with other team members.
- LinkedIn Scheduler: Automates scheduling of interviews and meetings with prospects.
- LinkedIn Salary: Provides compensation data for more informed hiring budgeting.
- Integrations: Plugins with applicant tracking systems (ATS) to manage candidates end-to-end.
Paid access helps large, sophisticated employers maximize their talent acquisition results. However, LinkedIn’s free capabilities still provide immense value for getting started.
What Kinds of Candidates Do Recruiters Target?
Recruiters on LinkedIn look for all types of candidates depending on the role, including:
- Active candidates openly searching for new jobs.
- Passive candidates not currently looking to make a change.
- Niche experts with very specialized skills and experience.
- Generalist candidates able to adapt across many functions.
- Junior-level professionals looking to advance their careers.
- Senior-level leaders to fill executive positions.
- Regional candidates located in a specific geography.
- Remote workers open to telecommuting opportunities.
- Top performers at competitor or peer companies.
- Alumni from key universities and feeder companies.
In reality, LinkedIn enables connecting with all types of employed and unemployed prospects with the skills to fill open roles. It removes physical location and current employment status as recruitment barriers.
What Information is Visible to Recruiters?
The depth of information visible to recruiters depends on members’ profile settings. Here are some elements recruiters can potentially see:
- Photo
- Name
- Headline and current position
- Location
- Summary
- Work experience
- Education
- Skills
- Accomplishments
- Recommendations
- Posts and activity
- Connections
- Groups
- Honors and awards
However, members can choose to omit certain details and customize what’s visible to signal they are open to being contacted. Recruiters should respect candidates’ privacy preferences and only connect professionally.
Is LinkedIn Recruiting Worth the Investment?
Considering LinkedIn’s dominance as the #1 recruiting platform, investing in it delivers substantial ROI including:
- Up to 40% reduction in cost-per-hire compared to traditional recruiting.
- 50% more candidates in pipeline compared to job boards.
- 7x more conversions to hires from InMail vs. cold calls.
- 65% of firms increased productivity using Recruiter.
- +$1,000s saved in agency fees per hire.
- 2x faster time-to-fill roles with Recruiter.
- 30-60% of all talent acquisitions attributed to LinkedIn.
The efficiency gains, expanded reach, and quality hires generated by LinkedIn make it an essential investment for modern recruitment success.
Conclusion
LinkedIn has become the recruiting platform of choice for HR professionals and hiring managers worldwide. Its unmatched reach, rich candidate data, and smart tools enable sourcing higher quality talent faster than ever. While LinkedIn requires an investment of time and money to maximize, its payoff in better hires makes it indispensable for any growing organization competing for talent. Any recruiter not leveraging LinkedIn is at a major disadvantage versus peers, almost guaranteeing losing top candidates to the competition. In today’s tight labor market, a world-class LinkedIn presence and recruiting strategy is an operational must-have.
