Online for the past 15 years, LinkedIn has become one of the essential tools for recruiting and recruiting.
After the arrival at the end of the 90s of the first online ad portals, to change the life and habits of HR and candidates, LinkedIn has also arrived, a platform that not only makes you publish your curriculum online, but also helps you create a network professional to draw from for collaborations and new career opportunities.
LinkedIn is not only a useful tool for candidates, but for some time it has been developing solutions that make work easier for companies and recruiters
Today candidates study and evaluate companies just like when they have to choose a product to buy.
Attracting talents also means being able to communicate your vision and the opportunities for professional growth that the company offers. And this is done precisely through employer branding strategies
LinkedIn Career Pages were born precisely to work on employer branding. These are pages where you can post videos and other multimedia materials, employee testimonials and a complete list of job vacancies.
In addition, they can be customized according to who visits them. Another classic tool that LinkedIn offers are job advertisements.
To publish a job offer for a vacant position it is necessary to have a company page and the advertisement is subject to a fee. The mechanism is like that of advertisements: you set a daily spending budget and pay according to the number of views of the ad.
Once the offer is published, the recruiter will also have InMail messages available to be able to contact the “smart correspondences”. InMail messages are those that allow you to write to people you are not connected with and are only available with paid profiles or recruiter tools.
Then there are the Work With Us ads – which allow you to promote personalized job offers for a fee based on the profile of the individual user – and the Job Slots ads to promote open positions in various sections of LinkedIn.
At this point we come to perhaps the most useful and also the most expensive tool: LinkedIn Recruiter, of which there is a so-called Corporate version and a Lite version more suitable for small and medium-sized businesses.
Basically, Recruiter allows you to do advanced searches based on the type of profile you are looking for and then to contact potential candidates directly.
With the Lite version you get a single account, a limited number of projects to organize candidates, 30 InMail messages per month, a list of who has visited the profile in the last 90 days and profiles potentially interested in your company, the possibility of save up to 50 candidates.
With the full version of LinkedIn Recruiter, the numbers of projects and messages increase but above all you get more users who can collaborate with each other, you can build a pipeline of candidates and receive analytical data. In addition, you can access the Spotlights which are used to identify candidates who have already had contact with their company or those who are more likely to get involved.
How to use Linkedin to recruit and get results.
You cannot think of entrusting everything to job advertisements and then sit and wait for resumes in target and quality to rain down.
The recruiter must have an active part in the research process, especially if he wants to attract talent. Nor can it be limited to research, it must bring into play the human and relational element.
That is, he must understand what are the priorities and aspirations of the potential candidate and must try to involve him based on those.
Since much of this process takes place online, to make conversations less cold and detached, it is important to work on customizing the contact methods, texts and content that are sent to candidates.
In this we are helped by the data that we can obtain from LinkedIn Recruiter or in the future from Talent Insights or those that we have collected independently with third-party applications.
Having data and information and studying them helps us to understand the desires of candidates and therefore to know how to attract them to our company.
It is no coincidence that the use of data in recruiting is a growing trend that is joining with artificial intelligence to automate and speed up some processes.
This means that recruiters will have to acquire new skills to analyze data and also to work with a whole range of tools at their disposal.
Of course, without losing sight of those interpersonal skills they have always needed. And what we said at the beginning about employer branding means that HR departments will have to work together with marketing and communication to create and promote content to attract talent to the company.
Furthermore, today recruiting does not only pass through LinkedIn, but also through other social channels, depending on the needs of the company.
The research and selection of personnel through social networks requires a great preparation and collaboration between various departments.
Therefore, recruiting has become a more complex job than what was done before the internet.