LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with over 660 million users worldwide. It is an invaluable tool for recruiting and hiring, allowing you to search for qualified candidates, post jobs, review applications, and communicate with potential hires.
One of LinkedIn’s most useful features for recruiters and hiring managers is the ability to create a hiring team. A hiring team allows you to collaborate with colleagues during the recruiting and hiring process. You can add recruiters, hiring managers, coordinators, and anyone else involved in reviewing candidates and making hiring decisions.
Adding people to your LinkedIn hiring team is easy and provides many benefits. This guide will walk you through the steps for creating a hiring team and adding members.
Benefits of Having a LinkedIn Hiring Team
There are several key advantages to setting up a hiring team on LinkedIn:
- Improved collaboration – Everyone involved in hiring can easily share feedback, comments, and evaluations for each candidate in one place.
- Enhanced coordination – You can assign responsibilities and workflows to make sure all tasks like phone screens, interviews, assessments, and offers are completed.
- Centralized applications and profiles – All members can view, evaluate, and progress candidates in the team workspace.
- Structured approach – A team allows you to create a structured recruiting process with defined stages and steps.
- Shared metrics and goals – You can generate reports on key hiring metrics and track progress towards recruiting goals as a team.
- Better hiring decisions – Leveraging the experience and perspectives of all team members leads to better assessment of candidates.
Having a coordinated hiring team enables a more organized, metrics-driven, and collaborative recruiting process. You reduce redundant work while improving hiring outcomes.
Who to Add to Your LinkedIn Hiring Team
The types of colleagues you should consider adding to your LinkedIn hiring team include:
- Recruiters – Your recruiters or talent acquisition specialists can help source, screen, and evaluate candidates.
- Hiring managers – Managers for the roles you are hiring for should be involved to assess candidates’ experience and qualifications.
- Team members – Consider adding non-managers who work in the department/team you are hiring for.
- Office manager/coordinator – This person can schedule interviews and coordinate with candidates.
- HR manager – HR can provide input on benefits, compensation, and compliance considerations.
- Executives – High-level leaders may want visibility into key hires for senior-level roles.
The optimal hiring team size is usually 3-8 people. You want enough perspectives to make informed decisions without too many cooks in the kitchen.
Requirements to Add Team Members
To add someone to your LinkedIn hiring team, there are a few requirements:
- LinkedIn Recruiter seat – You need an active Recruiter seat on LinkedIn. This gives you access to Recruiter tools like hiring teams.
- Manager permissions – Only administrators and managers in Recruiter can add people to hiring teams.
- LinkedIn accounts – Anyone you want to add needs to have their own LinkedIn account.
Most companies with 2-3 active recruiters choose LinkedIn Recruiter Team Edition which starts at $1,299 per month. This gives you 5-15 Recruiter seats to build out your hiring team.
How to Create a LinkedIn Hiring Team
Here are step-by-step instructions for creating your hiring team on LinkedIn:
- Navigate to the Recruiter homepage and click on “Teams” in the top menu.
- Click the “Create new team” button.
- Give your hiring team a name like “Marketing Hiring Team” and add an optional description.
- Select team settings like notifications and permissions.
- Click “Create team” to finish setting up the foundation for your hiring team.
Once the team is created, you can start adding members.
How to Add People to Your LinkedIn Hiring Team
To add members your newly created LinkedIn hiring team:
- Go to the “Teams” page and click on your new hiring team.
- Click the “Manage team members” button.
- Enter the name, LinkedIn profile URL, or email address of the person you want to add.
- Select the permissions level you want them to have like Viewer, Recruiter, Manager, etc.
- Click “Send” to invite them to the team or “Add” to directly add them.
- Once they accept the invite, they will appear in your team members list.
You can repeat this process to add all the key colleagues you want involved in recruiting and hiring.
Aim for 3-8 strategic team members. You can always remove members later if needed.
Best Practices For Managing Your Hiring Team
To get the most value from your LinkedIn hiring team, keep these best practices in mind:
- Clearly define responsibilities – Make sure each member understands their role.
- Agree on workflows – Determine the sequential steps in your process like screening, interviewing, selection.
- Communicate proactively – Provide updates on candidates, new roles, and changes to the process.
- Set expectations on response time – Agree on the turnaround time for completing assessments and reviews.
- Review metrics regularly – Analyze recruiting metrics as a team to identify areas for improvement.
- Gather feedback – Get input from team members on what is working well and challenges.
- Refine as needed – Optimize your team composition, workflows, and processes iteratively.
Investing in setup, coordination, and team development will maximize your results and benefits from having a hiring team on LinkedIn.
Conclusion
Adding key colleagues and stakeholders to your LinkedIn hiring team streamlines your recruiting efforts and leads to better hiring outcomes. With a structured team, you gain improved coordination, candidate visibility, structured workflows, and shared metrics.
The process for creating a hiring team and adding members is simple and straightforward within LinkedIn Recruiter. Focus on inviting 3-8 diverse colleagues whose experience and expertise will elevate your hiring decisions. Implement best practices around defining responsibilities, agreeing on processes, communicating proactively, and refining over time.
Leverage LinkedIn’s hiring team feature to make recruiting and hiring more collaborative, metrics-driven, and successful for your organization. Let your team serve as force multipliers to help secure top talent.