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LinkedIn has become a leading tool for finding new employees and connecting with industry experts. Companies such as Dropbox, Amazon, Microsoft are all found on LinkedIn. These companies used their own strategies to find talent that was already in the market rather than recruiting fresh college graduates just out of school like most large corporations do today.
LinkedIn is a social networking platform centered on its users’ professional networks. Individuals may use the platform to interact with current and past coworkers, join industry organizations, and look for and apply for employment with companies. As a small company, you may use the site to locate your next employee from a pool of prospects it has on hand.
Once you’ve found a prospective applicant, use a simple yet comprehensive HR tool like Zenefits to ease the recruiting process. It allows you to quickly issue offer letters, conduct background checks, and allow new recruits to self-onboard before their first day on the job. Zenefits also offers additional payroll tools as well as the ability to provide and administer employee benefits from a single platform.
We’ll teach you how to make the most of LinkedIn to discover your next employee in this post.
How Does LinkedIn Help Small Businesses?
Depending on whatever level of service they pay to, small companies may utilize LinkedIn to find their next employee in a variety of ways. You may contact people in your professional network of contacts for free using the basic service. Premium and Recruiter bring further capabilities like LinkedIn InMail, which increase the pool of people you may contact and the methods you can use to reach them.
The Premium and Recruiter subscriptions on LinkedIn have a few more features that we’ll go through below. However, you may start with their free plan and take a few steps. Regardless of the LinkedIn plan you belong to, here are some basic recommendations to help you find your next employee.
How to Find Your Ideal Candidate Using LinkedIn’s Free Plan
Even if they aren’t actively seeking for a new job, there are several actions you may take to locate and pursue your potential prospects.
Create a profile page for your business.
Your initial step should be to create your own company’s profile page before reaching out to anybody. This is due to two key factors:
- Putting a professional look on your company can make it more appealing to prospective employees.
- It will be simpler for prospective prospects to locate you if you create a keyword-rich profile.
It’s also important to note that creating your page isn’t enough; you must also maintain it up to date. Make sure your company’s address, phone number, and any current job advertising are all current. Consider showcasing any previous work that you’re proud of.
For your company’s page, Beth Granger of Beth Granger Consulting recommends investing on a bespoke picture backdrop. “That area is like a billboard,” she argues, “so why waste it?” This is how hers appears:
Make contact with former and current coworkers.
Invite everyone you’ve worked with in the past or present to connect, particularly those with whom you’ve had a good connection. Because LinkedIn is based on relationships, expanding your network should be your top priority while looking for new personnel. These contacts may be able to introduce you to job searchers they know.
Make Your Invitation Unique
So, how do you get in touch with people you haven’t met but want to, like job prospects or freelancers you’d want to hire? To describe who you are and why you’d want to connect, LinkedIn enables you to use up to 300 characters in your connection invitation request. As a result, we propose that you customize your invitation. Then mail it and hope for a positive response.
Keywords may be used to find candidates.
Even if they haven’t applied for your position, you may find exceptional prospects. Your ideal prospect may have missed your job ad on a job board, or they may not be actively seeking for work right now. Maybe if the appropriate situation arose, they’d be interested? To let recruiters know they’re looking for a new job, LinkedIn users may choose yes on the job searching option under privacy in their account settings.
According to Gallup polling, 51% of respondents are contemplating changing jobs. They’re known as passive job prospects since they may desire a new job but haven’t begun searching for one yet. That implies each professional you contact on LinkedIn has a 50/50 chance of being interested in a good opportunity.
Once you’ve found a potential candidate, look through their profile to see if you have any mutual connections. If you do, contact that person and request that they introduce you. This will not only bring you in touch with the prospect, but the connection you share will also help to authenticate your company’s image. The data below comes from RecruitLoop and shows what job hopefuls want to know.
What applicants are looking for RecruitLoop is the source for this information.
You may look for applicants based on their talents, job titles, former employers in your sector, or almost any other term in their profile.
Candidates may be found on their LinkedIn Groups.
If you need a project manager, an HR representative, or a social media expert, the top candidates are likely to be active members of their respective industry associations. Some of those group administrators may be delighted to have you as a possible employer of group members join. You may read their postings, comment on their chats, and contact individuals who you think might be a good fit for your team, even if it seems a little creepy. Given that LinkedIn is largely a networking platform, there is an unspoken agreement that this will happen.
Thought leaders, available employees, and individuals who can help you network to discover your next employee may all be found in LinkedIn groups. Of course, there are many more tools on LinkedIn that we won’t go over in this post, such as their salary tool, but Groups is a fantastic place to start.
Groups is a free service provided by LinkedIn and is one of the company’s numerous business products.
Join a group like Social Media Today if you’re seeking for a marketing specialist, or the Project Manager (PM) Network if you’re looking for a project manager. It’s as easy as putting the industry or job type into the search box, such as ‘engineering,’ and then choosing Groups as seen below.
Here’s an example of how to use LinkedIn to search for and join groups.
Employees that are currently working for you are your best advocates.
Consider encouraging your staff to use their existing networks to promote you and your firm by posting favorable material on their social media pages. According to Glassdoor, around half of employees would gladly do so.
Why should workers be the ones who communicate firm information, rather than you or HR? Because, according to Glassdoor data, potential workers are more inclined to trust current employees than the company’s leadership team. And if such persons are also family members, you may trust them completely. Requesting that your most dedicated workers promote your organization on LinkedIn may be more effective than just posting job adverts.
Glassdoor is the source for this information.
Employees are unlikely to take good action if you don’t ask them to. According to a 2014 research by Weber Shandwick, 39 percent of workers have expressed favorable feelings about their workplace, while only 33% of companies actively support it. Employers that encourage workers to promote the firm on social media see a 50% boost in employee social sharing. These are the extra advantages, according to Glassdoor.
LinkedIn is the ideal location for workers to provide good comments about you and your firm, and it might make or break your organization’s potential to recruit top talent.
Support Your Other Recruiting Efforts with LinkedIn
You may already be posting positions on free job search sites like Indeed or paid job advertising sites like ZipRecruiter, so utilize LinkedIn to do background checks on any applicants. Based on their profile, LinkedIn can assist you to assess whether candidates are actually experienced vs those who have just made up a great-sounding résumé. Of course, not everyone maintains their accounts up to date, thus LinkedIn should only be used as one source of information. You might also contact their previous employer, coworker, or anyone who has offered favorable comments on their profile using LinkedIn InMail, a feature of LinkedIn Premium.
Dr. Andrew Selepak, a social media specialist, offers some extra insight:
“LinkedIn Premium helps corporations to recruit and people to connect with others in their sector since it allows users to engage with others outside of their immediate professional networks.” When attempting to network or recruit, it’s critical to take advantage of this. People change professions and contact information like never before, and LinkedIn is a terrific way to stay in touch with those who do, as well as build connections that might be advantageous to both parties.” — University of Florida’s Andrew Selepak, PhD
Upgrade to LinkedIn Premium to Improve Your Recruiting
There are numerous subscription options available on LinkedIn. Upgrade to LinkedIn Premium, for example, and you’ll have access to a useful tool called InMail. LinkedIn’s messaging function, InMail, enables Premium customers to send messages to people with whom they haven’t yet linked. If you’ve identified a prospect you’d want to pursue but don’t have a mutual connection, InMail will allow you to contact them.
LinkedIn Recruiter is an extra layer of service available to organizations wishing to recruit new staff. However, we suggest LinkedIn Premium for most small companies. It adds features to their free basic plan that you’re most likely to utilize, such as InMail, while keeping the price low when compared to LinkedIn Recruiter.
What Does a LinkedIn Premium Subscription Cost?
The Business plan costs $47.99 per month, while the Executive plan costs $99.99 per month. The only difference between the two is that the Business plan includes 15 InMails each month, whilst the Executive plan includes 30.
LinkedIn Premium pricing LinkedIn Premium (source)
Let’s compare the cost of LinkedIn Premium shown above to hiring a recruiter at $48,100 per year (salary estimate per LinkedIn’s Salary Tool; paying a recruiting firm 30% of a hired person’s first-year salary; or joining a job search site like ZipRecruiter, which would cost you $249-$349 per month and still limit the number of resumes you could view.
The Benefits of LinkedIn Premium
Here’s what you receive with LinkedIn Premium and how each of these features might help you attract new workers as a company owner or HR professional.
E-mail (and Free InMail Template)
LinkedIn’s own email system, InMail, allows you to contact someone without revealing your personal email address. When you send an InMail, it is sent to the email address shown in the recipient’s LinkedIn profile. It’s like sending them an email, but without revealing your or their email addresses.
The LinkedIn Premium Business account allows you to send 15 InMails every month, whereas the LinkedIn Executive account allows you to send 30. When you’re looking for a top-notch employee among a sea of pros, having the ability to contact anybody you want without knowing their email address may be quite useful.
Of course, you may use LinkedIn to send a message to any of your existing contacts for free. You’ll need LinkedIn Premium if you wish to connect with someone outside of your network.
Consider these suggestions to improve the effectiveness of your LinkedIn InMails when it comes to recruitment.
- Share how their abilities meet your job requirements to personalize your message to the job seeker.
- Relate your reason for contacting the person to anything you saw or read on their profile, such as “I notice we attended to the same college, [university name],” or “I see we went to the same high school, [high school name].”
- Give the receiver a reason to respond to you, such as “I enjoyed your comments on [xx] and was wondering if you knew someone searching for a position with skills comparable to yours.”
- Provide a mechanism for the receiver to reach you outside of LinkedIn, such as a phone number, a website link, or a work email address (many people monitor LinkedIn via email rather than logging in to the site)
- Follow up with a connection request so that if they answer, you may continue to communicate without using any more InMail credits.
See who has looked at your profile.
Use this LinkedIn Premium tool to check who’s looking at your company or personal profile – they may be job searchers! Send them a free invitation to join on LinkedIn, or use LinkedIn InMail to send a lengthier message introducing your company and any open openings.
Take a look at our Business Insights.
Check out what LinkedIn has to say about your company or organizations you want to hire from, particularly if they’re laying off the kind of individuals you need. Examining business data might assist you in deciding what changes to make in your own firm to make it more desirable to job seekers.
Job Insights may be found here.
This is a service that enables job searchers to look at your job posts and learn more about your business. When job searchers utilize the Job Insights tool on LinkedIn, make sure everything you publish highlights your organization as a fantastic place to work, because they will.
Check out some potential candidates.
With LinkedIn Premium, you may go through the profiles of people you might want to recruit. You may invite anybody up to a third-degree link to connect with you. You may also send InMails to people with whom you are not linked.
LinkedIn Education
You will be able to attend business training courses at no extra cost as a result of this. There are nearly 600 recruitment classes alone!
Activate Your Account
Setting your LinkedIn Premium account to ‘open profile’ enables people to contact you without having to use their LinkedIn InMail credits, which increases the likelihood of job searchers contacting you.
You may read anyone’s profile and even contact individuals you haven’t met yet, such as job searchers, in addition to all the other benefits of LinkedIn Premium.
The Benefits of LinkedIn Recruiter
LinkedIn Premium isn’t the only premium tool you can use to discover your next employee on the platform. If you have a greater budget, want to perform a lot of hiring, or are in a recruitment company, LinkedIn Recruiter is a good option. It’s one of many LinkedIn Talent Solutions, which also includes Job Slots and Paid Job Ads.
What Is the Price of LinkedIn Recruiter?
LinkedIn Recruiter is available in two versions: Lite ($99.95 per month) and Corporate ($825.95 per month). LinkedIn Recruiter has a lot of features that a normal small company owner doesn’t require, particularly because sites like Indeed enable you to post positions and see resumes for free.
With Recruiter Lite, you get the same amount of InMails (30) as with LinkedIn Premium Executive, but it costs $20 more.
The Recruiter Corporate subscription, which costs $999.99 a month, is overkill for a small business unless you’re a recruitment firm or expect to hire more than 100 new employees per year. However, if you’re trying to employ an executive, $12,000 a year is still cheaper than hiring a full-time recruiter or staffing company, which may charge up to 30% of an executive’s first-year compensation as a fee.
Features
Similar to LinkedIn Premium, you’ll be able to search for and contact applicants via InMail with LinkedIn Recruiter. The only significant advantage of Recruiter Lite over LinkedIn Premium is the option to store searches, get a few more InMail credits (30 total), and save templates for the InMails you send most often. However, it isn’t much better than LinkedIn Premium’s Executive Plan, which is less expensive.
You won’t gain any substantial extra recruitment advantages unless you upgrade to Recruiter Corporate, which includes application tracking, a talent pipeline, multiple users, and the ability to collect input from managers throughout the interviewing and hiring process.
While LinkedIn Recruiter is a wonderful alternative for recruiters and large firms, most small businesses should use LinkedIn Premium. There are a variety of less-priced HR and application tracking services available to small company owners.
When it comes to LinkedIn, there are a few things you should avoid doing
Before we go, we’d want to give some useful hints that may not be as relevant on social networking sites for friends and family, but we suggest that you don’t do these things on a company site:
- Don’t squander valuable site space, such as your LinkedIn profile picture or description. Instead, use that area to promote your business, yourself, and your brand. Get a professional headshot and don’t upload pictures of you fishing in shorts throughout the summer (unless fishing charters are your business).
- Don’t waste your time by spamming. Avoid utilizing automatic email tools when contacting job prospects. As you would want a job seeker to do for you, personalize each InMail or message to the individual you’re contacting.
- Don’t throw away your InMails. Use the free invitation to connect function to see whether the person wishes to connect with you first. You won’t receive a response through InMail if they don’t accept your request to connect.
- Don’t make it seem like you’re trying to sell anything. Personalize your communications and make it obvious what makes the person you’re contacting special to you. Make an effort to be engaged and fascinating.
- On your LinkedIn profile, in a group post, or in an Inmail or message, don’t publish unprofessional content or links. If you want to let people know that your cat has digestive difficulties, you should do it on Facebook rather than LinkedIn. Consider using other social media platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for those funny family updates and caustic political comments.
Final Thoughts
LinkedIn is a social networking site based on your professional connections. Users may connect with current and past coworkers, and companies can create their own page to advertise themselves. As a result, LinkedIn is an excellent place for job searchers and companies wanting to employ to connect.
Remember that Zenefits makes recruiting LinkedIn applicants a breeze. Employees may self-onboard with an all-in-one HR platform, which includes completely integrated payroll, benefits administration, compliance support, an HR library, and more.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is LinkedIn Premium free for employees?
A: If you are an employee, LinkedIn Premium is free for everyone.
How do you find free candidates on LinkedIn?
A: LinkedIn is a professional networking website that allows users to look for potential employers, as well as post their resumes. The site also has advanced search features which can help you find candidates in various fields of interest.
How do I find a list of employees on LinkedIn?
A: To find a list of employees on LinkedIn, you should search for the company’s about page or their careers section. From there, hover over the View All option and click to select it.
