That is what I aimed to understand when I sat down with Matthew Delaney who was one of the top sourcers at LinkedIn.
Specifically I wanted to understand how LinkedIn uses LinkedIn Recruiter to identify top candidates for their roles.
In this edition of The LinkedIn Recruiter I will share how Matthew uses Recruiter to keep a healthy pipeline of candidates and cherry pick top candidates for his open roles.
Step 1 – Set up your search for success
The first thing I asked Matthew was:
“What is the most important thing to do when starting a recruiter search?”.
To my surprise, Matthew started speaking of setting up your search for success.
Rather than starting your search with Job Title and Location, it is better to start with your absolute must-haves.
The first, and most important thing is to start with your “Companies” filter.
If you want to find external candidates you should include this in your search by adding your company to the “Companies” filter and clicking the “stop” sign over the company name.
This will make recruiter look exclusively for candidates outside of your company.
Set up any language requirements (or other must-haves)
Once you have asked Recruiter to look for exclusively external candidates, you should continue by adding your non-negotiable must-haves.
The specific must-have skill that Matthew showed was Language because this is a must-have skill for specific sales roles at LinkedIn.
With the “Spoken Language” filter, you can quickly identify candidates who speak a specific language and, on top of that, this filter also allows you to add the proficiency needed of that spoken language.
This allows you to tailor your search to a specific language proficiency which is needed for your specific role.
Include Location
At this point, we are looking for external candidates who match our absolute must-have, such as a spoken language.
Now we are ready to identify the people who match to a specific location.
The most common way to do this is to include the location you want to search for.
However, Matthew showed how you can set up your location to include candidates who are either currently living in the location or who are open to relocate to the location.
If you include Stockholm, Sweden, in your search, you can open up your talent pool by including candidates who are open to relocate to Stockholm.
This information is pulled from the candidate when they identify that they are “open for work” in a specific region.
This is a massively untapped part of the talent pool which can provide you with a top candidate that not many other people are looking for.
This is specifically beneficial for large cities.
Years of experience and Job Function
From here, you can start to narrow down your search to find people who match the required experience you are looking for.
By utilizing the “Years of experience” filter, you can look for candidates who have worked for a specific amount of time.
However, the thing that surprised me was that even though Matthew was narrowing down his search, he was still adamant to allow yourself to capture all possible candidates.
As such, using the Job Function filter is the next step.
The Job Function filter pools in all the candidates within a specific job function.
Instead of writing out all possible job titles for sales, you can simply add the “Sales” option in the Job Function to do this.
The reason why this is important is because it allows us to find candidates who match our must-have skills and experience but who might have a different job title than you’d expect.
Include the “Recruiting activity” filter for a better candidate experience
One of the most important filters to save you time and provide a better candidate experience is the “Recruiting activity” filter.
This takes away candidates who have already been contacted by anyone in your company over a selected timeframe.
Not only is this important for the recruiter to not waste their time on candidates who have already said “no” 1 month ago, but it also helps you build a stronger employer brand as every interaction your candidates have with you matter to your brand.
At this point, you have set up your search for success by including all possible candidates who match our must haves.
Now you can start filtering the Total Addressable Market of candidates that match you must-haves to identify candidates who have your “nice to have” qualifications.
Step 2 – Boolean and “nice to haves”
This is not an article explaining Boolean but Boolean is your best friend when identifying specific candidates.
The keyword filter in recruiter allows you to find candidates who match certain keywords that you add to your search. When you add a keyword to your search, recruiter will go through all profiles to see if they have this keyword.
An example of this could be if you want to find candidates who know “java”.
Not all people who know and work with java would have the title of “java developer” so by using the keyword search we can look deeper than just the title to find more candidates.
Apart from using boolean in the keyword filter, you can always use all the other available filters in recruiter by pressing the “advanced search” button in the bottom left of your search.
This allows you to access a vast array of qualifications such as education, skills, or other seniority.
Step 3 – Workplace type
LinkedIn recently added a new filter called “Workplace type” which allows you to identify candidates who wish to work remote, hybrid, or on-site.
Do yourself and the candidate a favour and use this filter to avoid this being an issue after 3 interviews.
Matthew’s personal touch – Diversity recruiting
At the end of our chat, I asked Matthew for any personal touches that he may add to his sourcing and we started talking about how to find more diverse candidates.
There are no filters on LinkedIn based on diversity, such as gender or ethnicity, so if you are looking for any type of diversity recruiting you need to use keywords and a bit of research.
Through a bit of research you can find names of groups, employee resource groups, networks etc. which are allies of certain minority groups.
Some widely used examples of this are Women in Tech, Latinx, or BIG (Black Inclusion Group). By searching for these keywords, you are more likely to find more diverse candidates.
Lastly, you can also add languages or regional dialects in your boolean search to identify members who speak that regional dialect.
This is an effective way to quickly increase your chances of increasing the diversity in your talent pool.
Stay Tuned for More Tips!
With a clear and concise strategic goal in mind, it’s time to put your employer brand into practice. Make sure to follow Techruit on LinkedIn for more insights and updates. Also, subscribe to our blog on techruit.se to get the latest tips and best practices for employer branding on LinkedIn straight to your inbox.
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