Everyone is familiar with LinkedIn, especially recruiters with enterprise accounts. But are TA leaders using this popular networking platform to smartly source the best candidates efficiently and effectively?
Join Katie Stevens, Roseanne Donohue, Sinda Allen, and Eric Jaquith as they discuss recruiting best practices with Checkster’s Let’s Talk Recruiting’s Sean Rehder. The panelists will navigate the best ways to leverage LinkedIn to help ensure your team is using the tool to its full potential. Watch the webinar here!

Our panelists:

LinkedIn Talent Insights:
If your company has the budget for it, one panelist felt that LinkedIn Talent Insights offers superior and specialized reports and optimizes searches in a way that other tools don’t. It connects with LinkedIn Recruiter and provides users with real-time data, including hiring trends, employer branding metrics, talent pool reports as well as a comprehensive look at your enterprise, competitors, and the market as a whole. If your company leaders want to understand a specific market, you are able to pull reports showing ability to hire in a certain area with great ease, up scaling your capabilities in less time. And the tool facilitates direct lead downloads seamlessly. By teasing out some important data, you can keep ahead of the competition while adding high quality candidates to your pipeline. This is something that should be on your recruiting best practices radar (and company wish list). And even though it costs more, much of the content is easily accessible and shareable, so you wouldn’t necessarily need to invest in multiple licenses. Learn more here!

Search Engine Optimization:
Never underestimate the power of SEO in your candidate searches. In this competitive landscape, it’s vitally important to understand what the algorithm wants: It’s all about keywords. Of course SEO can be used to great effect by candidates, but it equally benefits recruiters, especially if you’re trying to find hard-to-source or diverse candidates with specific skill sets. Make sure you pack your headline with the most relevant keywords for your topic, then list a summary of skills and so forth. Other tips include customizing your URL personal link for SEO, weighting it with keywords, i.e. “Cyber Security Recruiter,” while ensuring you’ve made as many professional connections as possible, to increase your visibility and to make sure you are featured higher in search results. This way, job seekers from a particular industry can find you more easily.

Sourcing Diverse and Underrepresented Talent:
Is LinkedIn an ideal resource to find diverse candidates? Yes! There are myriad tips and tricks to help your organization locate underrepresented qualified candidates, and is a great way to have your company “mirror” its environment and community. Some recruiting best practices include searching for diversity-focused groups like “Women in Technology,” “Hispanic Professionals,” “/dev/color,” and others. Many of these groups have their own job boards that recruiters can access to post open reqs. Another way to connect with candidates is to search for managers you know and respect on LinkedIn and see whom they have recommended. Then send a personal message to those candidates. Panelist Sinda Allen found that a great and unexpected subject line can differentiate you from the “noise” of other recruiting messages and emails. Mentioning a candidate’s hometown, alma mater, or making a joke about how they’re currently in the “wrong job” can help the candidate remember you and your company’s brand. By being specific and creative, she has gained valuable employees, (sometimes a year or two later), who have sought out opportunities at her company.

Project Management:
LinkedIn allows you to save any search, but you must save it to a project folder. For a better and clearer workflow, establish a “catch-all” folder and then you can build and save multiple searches within this folder, layering variations of searches as you go. One panelist recommends “hiding” candidates you have already seen as you refine your search for a particular project. This feature is very useful and will help speed up the time it takes to locate the best candidates for a particular role. As you build your searches, don’t forget to scan them for changes every couple of days-LinkedIn profiles are dynamic, and those candidates who didn’t match your search last week may be just the right fit for your project now. More recruiting best practices include using custom filters on LinkedIn. They are like building blocks and very useful to find niche or diverse candidates. These filters can be applied to any search and then saved for easy reference to share with your team. And don’t overestimate the “pick list” on LinkedIn. If you’re doing a search, try putting your criteria and keywords in quotations, to discover the maximum number of candidates-a trick your competitors may not be aware of.

Hot recruiting best practices tip: When starting a new recruiting position, immediately connect to co-workers on LinkedIn. Building your connections and network will contribute to strengthening your pipeline, whether you stay at the company or move to a different position later. Ultimately, all these recruiting best practices should help your pipeline reflect the best representation of high quality people available and help your team strategize key touch points and convert candidate leads to ideal employees.