According to the report “LinkedIn in Poland in 2021. January“, over 46% of all LinkedIn users in Poland are experienced employees, managers and directors. In addition to production, we will find there the largest number of representatives of the software and IT services industry (as many as 370,000 users).
There is great potential in professional social media. If we use it well, we can achieve benefits both in terms of creating our own image and the employer’s brand. This will help us conduct effective recruitment processes by reaching active people in the labor market and passive candidates. As the results of the LinkedIn survey show, as many as 70% of the employee population is the latter group, i.e. people who, although they are not actively looking for a new job, at the same time do not ignore a new job offer, which they may receive, for example, from headhunters and friends or via networking platforms.
LinkedIn is one of the most popular portals for acquiring new talent.
In this article, you will learn why it is worth getting interested in it and how to properly conduct recruitment and image-building activities there.
A few words about LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the most frequently used social media channel by Polish leaders. At the beginning of its existence (back in 2002), the platform was, above all, a collection of CVs. However, over time, the portal turned into a networking platform that grows in strength, used, to a large extent, for acquiring new professional contacts, building a personal brand, and recruiting new employees.
For many, LinkedIn has become an alternative to a personal website. Everyone can display their skills on the profile, boast about their professional experience and get recommendations. In addition, the portal allows you to expand the circle of friends from the industry and contact the professionals you are interested in. LinkedIn is also used to acquire customers, promote your own products or services (especially business ones), and reduce the distance between the recruiter and the candidate, allowing for more personal communication, as opposed to responding to an impersonal job advertisement.
What may be of interest to recruiters is the possibility of creating a company profile, where employers provide job offers and information about the company and its organizational culture. It is also worth assigning employees of the organization who have an account on this portal to the profile.
On LinkedIn, we can create a variety of content and post it on our boards. Employers and other users can communicate with others by using news entries, short films, as well as longer and detailed articles.
Why it is worth recruiting through LinkedIn
According to the data presented in the Kinsta meta-analysis, LinkedIn has 740 million users from over 55 million companies that are registered on the platform. Many LinkedIn members visit it every day (40%), but spend relatively little time on it, only 17 minutes a month. At the same time, over 1 billion interactions are recorded on the website each month. Therefore, when publishing content, it is worth taking care of its clarity and uniqueness.
We can find as many as 14 million vacancies on LinkedIn, which is probably one of the reasons why as many as 87% of recruiters use this portal regularly. Through LinkedIn, 122 million people were invited to an interview, and 35.5 million were hired as a result of interactions with another user. 3 people are employed via the platform every minute!
How to recruit using LinkedIn
Research shows that employees recruited through LinkedIn are 40% less likely to leave the company in the first 6 months. What tools to use to recruit them? We can use paid or free options. The first group includes the LinkedIn Recruiter function, which allows you to search for the best candidates, and the LinkedIn Job Board, where we can publish job offers. We can also carry out recruitment activities for free, e.g. by publishing inquiries and posts with an advertisement or searching for users according to their experience and skills.
- LinkedIn Recruiter is an effective tool that allows you to narrow your search results to a specific area, industry, or keywords. One of its functions is the ability to search for candidates based on a profile that meets our recruitment requirements. After entering the name of the ideal candidate, the portal displays similar profiles, taking into account qualifications and professional experience.
- The search slert is another LinkedIn Recruiter feature that allows you to save a search with filters and keywords, and notifies the recruiter every 24 hours about new results that match your criteria.
- The job board allows you to post job offers in a separate tab on the portal. Advertisements are shared with potential candidates, selected based on their search preferences. With this function, the employer can edit the company’s profile, conduct recruitment tasks, as well as analyze applications and respond to them immediately.
- Publication of an inquiry is one of the easiest and, at the same time, free methods of obtaining candidate applications. Thanks to such publication, other portal users will be able to help us in our search. It’s a good idea to share the posts with your coworkers and encourage them to share it on their profiles.
- The #Hiring and #OpenToWork banners are one of the recently introduced functions on the portal. It allows candidates to announce their openness to new professional challenges by adding a green banner with the words #OpenToWork to their profile picture. In turn, recruiters can add a purple graphic with the words #Hiring which informs the network that they are currently looking for new talent.
- Publication of information about the recruitment on the company profile will make all people who follow the company’s website learn about the new vacancy. There is a high probability that among them we will find active candidates waiting for the appearance of such an offer with us. It’s also a good idea to review the profiles of your company’s followers and contact them directly via a LinkedIn message.
- Using the LinkedIn search engine is a common practice among headhunters. We don’t need a paid package to use the search engine. However, the paid version will probably make our work easier, allowing us to reach the most interesting candidates faster.
However, LinkedIn is not a bulletin board. In addition to information on the recruitment processes, it is also worth publishing other content that will build the employer’s brand and the recruiter’s personal brand.
We should interweave job offers with other interesting content that may be of interest to the candidates. In addition to industry news and interesting facts about the company and organizational culture, we can, for example, share good practices regarding writing a CV or preparing for a job interview. We can also use LinkedIn to collect feedback from candidates. Thanks to this, we will get to know the perspective of our target group better.
If you would like to work with an IT recruitment agency that uses LinkedIn (among other tools) in the search process – contact us.