LinkedIn: How Best To Utilise The Platform For Your Candidate Search

LinkedIn have revolutionised the recruitment scene when they started in 2003. This guide explores how LinkedIn can help with your candidate search.

Whether you spend hours of your working day scrolling through the site or you're just a casual user. The chances are that if you're reading this, you most likely have a LinkedIn profile.

With a network featuring over 750 million members, the platform certainly reaches far and wide. The way that LinkedIn operate as a job-board cross social-media hybrid is completely unique in the industry - and it's works to fantastic effect.

From a job-seekers perspective, one of the first actions that they often take when seeking new employment is to update their LinkedIn profile and start engaging more with the platform. It's a great medium for connecting to recruiters and hiring managers, to really get your name out there.

How good is the LinkedIn platform for hiring?

The main driver of LinkedIn's remarkable success has stemmed from their ability to host so many passive and professional candidates - in one smart and intuitive platform.

This has been - and still is - a match made in heaven for most recruiters out there. The database of candidates is a goldmine for any recruiter out there and holds particular value for professional roles across a variety of sectors ranging from IT to marketing. Unlike most other job-boards LinkedIn also has a great reach for overseas candidates too which makes it's very effective for job roles outside the UK - in hiring hotspots such as Europe, America and Asia.

LinkedIn have arguably the cleanest and easiest to use platform for both hiring and seeking work, especially in the corporate business environment. Whilst this is a huge positive for most recruiters, they do lack the presence that many other job-boards have in sectors such as construction, driving and healthcare.

Is LinkedIn Premium worth it?

The LinkedIn premium feature offer various tiers which caters to a whole host of different needs. This stretches far beyond simply hiring but also assists with finding new leads and marketing your business effectively too. Before subscribing to a paid-for package you can take advantage of a 1-month free trial, after the initial trial period you will be charged on a rolling month-to-month basis, unless you cancel the subscription.

As recruiters spend many hours of their working day trawling through LinkedIn, it begs the question as to whether upgrading to a premium subscription is worth it? Like all investment decisions, this obviously comes down to the recruiters individual situation. The Recruiter Lite subscription starts at a cost of £109.99 per month and provides you with a respectable 30 InMails per month, advanced search filters and the ability to post a free job.

It's worth noting that they do offer quite substantial discounts to clients who prepay for the access. On their website it states: "If you choose to pay annually, you could save up to 33% compared to paying monthly". This is definitely worth exploring if you have the budget available.

A full LinkedIn Recruiter subscription comes in a lot higher than this around the £6k mark for the full year. This may seem quite steep, but for many recruiters this will pay itself off relatively quickly. After all, you're provided with 150 InMails each month, unlimited profile views and the ability to share your account with other users within your business. For many white-collar, office and senior-level recruiters - it's often commended as being an invaluable tool.

Any other features worth knowing about?

An effective way to hire on LinkedIn is via joining various groups which are relevant to your recruitment market and/or demographic. This way you can build up your number of connections with highly-matched candidates. An example of this would be to join a specific advertising group to assist with your marketing positions. This way you can keep a lookout for any talent that is involved within the group. Whether they are heavily active or simply a subscriber, it gives you a starting point for a conversation, should you reach out to them. You can also build up your personal brand by posting and contributing to such groups within a particular sub-sector. This can ultimately lead to more profile views, connections, direct messages and referrals.

How can I effectively market my companies profile on LinkedIn?

A good way of marketing your agency/business is by consistently posting on LinkedIn. It's essentially free advertising and can work exceptionally well if your content is relevant to your audience. Content that is insightful and informative tends to gather the most traction in the form of shares and comments by other users. If you're looking to hire internally, your company profile page will be one of the first things that potential new starters check so it's vital that you get this right. Updates like the following can be helpful:

• Staff photos for work anniversaries and promotions.

• Company updates and insights.

• Advertising campaigns that your business is undertaking.

What are the drawbacks of using LinkedIn?

Make no doubt about it, it's not all dandelions and rainbows - LinkedIn does have its fair share of flaws. Over the past few years it has deteriorated towards being more of a Facebook-esque platform, riddled with memes and virtue-signalling posts. This itself is a major challenge for LinkedIn to overcome as it can't physically control the content that it's users have to offer.

Dare I say it, but LinkedIn has become riddled with spam. The messages that I receive use to be productive and business related, but over the past couple of years it's taken a turn for the worse (crypto scams being the prime offender).

Some may even argue that LinkedIn has lost that business-edge which it had only a few years ago. If this carries on the way it is, LinkedIn may start to see both a plummet in daily sign-ins and profile numbers, which will ultimately have adverse effects upon the recruiters who rely heavily on the platform.

Overall rating: 9/10

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn are one of the best facilities to help with most clients recruitment needs, whether that's either just on the free or the paid-for premium basis. They belong in nearly every recruiters job-board portfolio, simply because they have the largest pool of professional candidates and offer a state-of-the-art platform, with many intuitive functions to make your day-to-day hiring workload that little bit easier.

An element of patience is required with the monotonous newsfeed content, but it's a small price to pay for such a rich source of candidate information.

They have a variety of different package options which are quite well tailored to work with a whole host of different recruiters hiring needs - and whilst some can lean on the expensive side - you do get what you pay for.

Please feel free to reach out either in the comment section below or via email to smartfind@outlook.com if you have any questions.