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The three LinkedIn features you should leverage to find your perfect candidate

Kate Allen, Executive Chair and Marketing Director, Allen Associates

Of all the social media platforms available to hiring managers, few can beat LinkedIn when it comes to sourcing and unearthing great talent.

LinkedIn’s role within the recruitment mix cannot be understated: from locating hard-to-find Candidates who are hidden away from the active jobs market (but open to new career opportunities) to those marketing themselves to potential employers. The question is, are you taking advantage of all that LinkedIn has to offer and maximising its potential to drive your recruitment strategy?

It is getting harder to recruit the people needed to fill your vacancies. With unemployment at its lowest levels since the early 1970s and continuing to fall, the pool of available talent is drying up each day. This is prompting Employers to become savvy with the strategy they take and invest in tools that can reduce both the time to hire and cost per hire. This is where LinkedIn comes into its own, providing the right tactics are utilised of course.

According to LinkedIn, there are currently over 9 million registered users in the UK. That’s one third of the entire working population. Of that number, 80% state that they use the site to search for new opportunities and to be found by Employers and recruiters. Against this backdrop, it makes sense for hiring managers to get to grips with exactly how the platform can bridge that ever-increasing gap between Employer and Employee.

Here we take a look at the five aspects of LinkedIn that have played a huge part in the recruiting strategies we employ on behalf of Clients that could help you too.

1. LinkedIn Jobs

The stats alone that support LinkedIn Jobs are enough to include this within your recruitment marketing. There are a plethora of jobs boards out there, but as the largest online professional network LinkedIn’s reach is unparalleled. One new hire is made via the platform every 10 seconds, while 90% of users state they are ‘open to new opportunities.’ If this is where most of your target Candidates are ‘hanging out’ online, you should be too. Moreover, 95% of UK recruiters use LinkedIn Jobs to promote their vacancies and source talent, so if it works for them it can do the same for you.

2. Hashtags

You would be forgiven for thinking that the use of hashtags is the reserve of Twitter. But you would be wrong. LinkedIn recently rolled out its imaginatively name ‘LinkedIn Hashtags’ that allow Employers and users to include relevant hashtags in their job ads and posts. The idea is a simple one – to enable their content to be more discoverable. So, if you are looking for a Marketer in London, hashtags such as #MarketingJobsLondon will make it easier for job seekers to find yours and similar roles.

3. Targeted Ads

As the name suggests, this option enables Employers to run a targeted job promotion campaign. It is perhaps the most proactive and equally effective LinkedIn tool, where the beauty lies in its simplicity. You can choose the criteria of what you want from your ideal Candidate, such as language, location, job function, and education among others. Once entered, LinkedIn will automatically generate an estimated target audience size, which you can then narrow down by adding or removing certain criteria so as to broaden your scope.

LinkedIn’s influence within the recruitment marketing mix cannot be understated, and its ability to boost the hiring success of Employers and recruiters alike is unrivalled. But it shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for other elements within your Candidate attraction strategy. Recruitment has and will always be a people business, so the personal touch should always play a key role at every stage of the process.

Over the last 20 years, we have grown as a business to become one of the leading independent recruitment agencies in Oxfordshire, and in 2018 have opened our first London office, to service Clients in the capital.

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