How Effective Is LinkedIn for Recruiting?

I am often asked, “Nigel, how can I utilise LinkedIn as a recruitment tool, organically?” A good question. How effective is LinkedIn for recruiting without spending money on Ads?

If you simply write a post about a job vacancy on your LinkedIn Company page and then stand back and wait for some responses, you will rarely be successful. Asking your employees to post about it won’t be very successful either.

For example …

Some years ago, I had a client in the legal sector who really struggled to find qualified new staff. Having sent direct messages to those with the right qualifications, and requests to Connect with them, they found almost no response from these people. It seemed to my client like LinkedIn was a dead duck. And it was.

So, my client and I got down to identifying the factors that might make a difference to their quest. Ultimately, it came down to five dependencies:

• Reach: The reach of your network and your employees’ networks.
• Content: The quality of the content you share, and how relevant it is to your industry.
• Profiles: The quality of all employee profiles in your company.
• Values: The clarity and attractiveness of your business’s ethical and cultural values.
• Persistence: The longevity of your strategy.

My client’s problem was a lack of ‘investment’ in their relationships with their desired audience. There was no connection, digital or otherwise, with their target market.

Leading from this, whenever they posted a job advert, it failed to resonate with the people they wanted to attract. Worse still, thanks to LinkedIn’s algorithms, it had no chance of reaching the right audience in the first place.

So, how can you turn this around?

Our first step was to build trust in my client’s target market to open them up for future opportunities. To do this, we:

• Improved the quality of all staff profiles and built them as ambassadors for the company’s brand. This created a cohesive identity among the staff, a genuine sense of belonging to an organisation, and demonstrated pride in the company brand.
• Started sharing content from everyone’s profiles, sharing knowledge and demonstrating the strong values that the practice held. This established them as an organisation of thought leaders.
• Developed everyone’s Connections with new people relevant to their sector. Effectively, this meant building relationships with their competitors, and it significantly improved their connectivity with the right audience.

We repeated these activities over time, and it stuck.

Now, whenever a job is posted, it is organically shared to a much wider audience. The referral value kicks in.

The point is, if you don’t invest properly in LinkedIn, it won’t deliver a return.

In this case, my client has turned LinkedIn into a free, organic recruitment platform and saved tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds in recruitment costs and LinkedIn Ad spending.

Bottom line …

LinkedIn is very effective at recruiting organically, but only if you invest your time in better profiles, better content, and better Connections.

What do you think? How have you succeeded in using LinkedIn as an effective recruitment tool? What did you do to improve your responses to job vacancies? Let me know over on LinkedIn.

For more advice on how to use LinkedIn the right way, check out my LinkedIn Training Course.