LinkedIn Jobs - Is the new system really working?
Dhaval Udani
Founder & CEO, danamojo.org - India's First Payment Solutions Platform for NGOs
Many of you might have experienced the change in the way LinkedIn now allows you to post jobs. Earlier it was a fixed price for a month (Rs. 1,900 for one job posting or Rs. 1,170 if you bought 10 together). Now they have moved to a daily budget model wherein like Google/Facebook Ads you pay per click on your job and you set a daily budget.
So when I decided to post on LinkedIn for a job we were looking to fill, LinkedIn recommended that I set a daily budget of Rs. 132 that would get me 19 applicants in 30 days. So spending Rs. 4,000 in a month would get me 19 applicants or roughly Rs. 200 per applicant. I was quite distraught since earlier for Rs. 1,170 we used to get 200+ applicants in a month thus costing about Rs. 5 per applicant. This was like a 4,000% increase!
Nevertheless I needed more people badly and figured out that Rs. 250 per day was the best bet and beyond it was not getting me anything incremental. Yet it would get me only 36 applications in 30 days! So basically in Rs. 7,500 for a month I would get 36 applicants or more than Rs. 200 per applicant.
But left with few options, I decided to try it out in the knowledge that it could be easily switched off as well in a couple of days if it did not work. So what actually happened. In the first 4 days of running the campaign, I received 58 applications itself. This cost me Rs. 1,300 (LinkedIn says it can go upto 30% higher than its daily budget if you are getting lots of applications). This meant my cost per applicant was now about Rs. 20 and not Rs. 200 as LinkedIn told me while buying. That's a 10X difference.
I then decided to reduce my budget to the minimum allowed by LinkedIn which was Rs. 66 per day. In 4 days of running the ad, I received 38 applications on a spend of Rs. 350 which is Rs. 10 per application. This is yet 2X of what LinkedIn used to charge earlier but not 40X more like they "recommended" to me.
So what does this mean for you?
1. Go for the lowest bid allowed by LinkedIn. It will yet get you decent number of applications.
2. Don't follow LinkedIn recommendation and don't worry about the low number of applications it says you will get. It will not be the case.
What does it mean for LinkedIn? It said my cost per application would be Rs. 200 but it was really Rs. 10. It was off by 20X. How does that happen? There can be only 2 explanations:
1. It's algorithm on determining number of applications is completely wrong
2. Its purposely showing this wrong number to make you spend more.
To me (1) seems highly unlikely for such a big company with great engineering talent. But even (2) seems improbable to me for such a large reputed company.
So what could be the answer? Any thoughts? Would love to hear from other people's practical experiences?
And would love to hear from LinkedIn as well.
LinkedIn Top Voice Global & India
6 年So my overall take on this model is that it's good for closing out positions that are more common, traditional, LinkedIn user type. In social sector, most people are actually not so active on LinkedIn, the roles are sometimes very unusual, the budgets are low so even more difficult to justify the cost of hiring. So this may not be a great offering by LinkedIn that will suit to us as of now.. But good post. Thank you for initiating conversation on this. I'm tagging few senior LinkedIn professionals in my network here who may give additional insights. George Anders Daniel Roth Roshan Krishnan
LinkedIn Top Voice Global & India
6 年Hi Dhaval, Just came across your post. I recently posted a job on LinkedIn on behalf of SVP's supported NGO. This was my first time so I didn't know anything about how the costing works. I got really confused with their costing model, and pulled out after a month. I was costed about 16K. However on my request, LinkedIn paid back. Now after reading your post, I have a few comments on LinkedIn's job posting model as well as your post in particular. I realize there's one good thing as a job poster on daily costing Vs fixed monthly costing. You can pull away anytime. If you get enough applications on day one itself, you can pull off. You may end up paying 30 ℅ more (as you mentioned), so 170 rupees. But assuming you get 170 applications on day one itself, your cost per applicant plunges to 1 rupee. This is good for traditional job roles in a booming market. The odds of closing the position on first day could be higher. However for untraditional roles, in non for profit sector, this is unlikely. I also felt that when you calculated cost per applicant on earlier model as rupees 5, you made an assumption that you get 200+ applications. It's possible you won't get any application and you would still end up paying
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7 年Yes we saw exactly this behaviour while hiring for Wherrelz Corporation - which is why we stopped hiring efforts through the LI Jobs portal. It could be us misunderstanding some functionality - but even if that's the case I found no clear explanation for it.