5 Tips to Find Top Talent Faster with LinkedIn Recruiter

Work smarter not harder with using these 5 tips and LinkedIn Recruiter.

My name is Hillary Taubman-Dye and I am the head of recruiting at LinkedIn.  My team and I each use LinkedIn Recruiter to successfully hire staff for LinkedIn. Using LinkedIn Recruiter, my searches are far more targeted, I send fewer resumes, and send more relevant candidates to my hiring managers. Since we spend fewer hours interviewing, it has saved the hiring managers hours of time, while finding better talent.

Through my experience using LinkedIn Recruiter I have compiled a list of tips to optimize usage of LinkedIn Recruiter that I wanted to share with you.   While this list is focused on the LinkedIn Recruiter tool, several of the tips apply to using LinkedIn in general to recruit.

How I get the best candidates faster:

Delegate. You don’t have to do all the work yourself. Create your search using all the titles, keywords, and criteria you wish and save it. Then delegate the daily check for new candidates to the Search Alert. LinkedIn Recruiter will tell you when new or updated profiles match your search.

Don’t sell. When writing an InMail to a passive candidate through LinkedIn Recruiter, I always remember that this person might not have thought yet about making a career change. Telling them “we’re hiring, check out the job description and apply online” lands my message is the deleted items. LinkedIn is ultimately a networking site so network with the potential candidates. Their referrals might be your next hires.

Choose Efficiency. Why anyone would click on to a profile and send one InMail at a time is beyond me. By creating lists of potential candidates in a Project, I can choose multiple profiles and send them all the same InMail template in a few clicks.

Personality is Key. Let your personality shine through in your InMail messages and personalize them to meet the experience of the person you’re reaching out to. You have to be a bit tricky with the personalization when creating an InMail template you’ll use for many people however simply letting them know you reviewed their LinkedIn profile tells them you’re not a spammer.

Organize. Two words, use Projects. I keep the job post, the searches and the profiles of potential candidates in a Project labeled for the open position. I never have to search for someone I sent and InMail to weeks ago or hunt for which search I saved for a particular opening. It’s all there for me and I can even share that information with my team and collaborate with them in the hunt.

Here’s a bonus tip for you – Don’t Wait for the Open Req – start your searches and get the Search Alerts working for you when you hear the job is coming open. Start saving interesting profiles into the Project you create for the position and then, when the req is approved, you’ll be ready to hit “send” on the InMail and off to the races.