LinkedIn Sourcing Tactics To Find Ideal Candidates

Recruiters are always on the lookout for hidden gems and undiscovered talent. Finding candidates that fit perfectly with your organization is every recruiter’s dream. While most recruiters are on the hunt for top talents, many might miss out. 

Sourcing the right talent poses to be a challenge for many recruiters. However, amidst the competition, it’s essential to have your eyes open. Hire top candidates who fit your role or else settle for less. To begin with, you need to prioritize the platforms you look into while searching for candidates. We asked around recruiters at Ideas2IT to find out which platform or tool they prefer to search for candidates. LinkedIn clearly stood as one of the most preferred platforms to seek professionals. 

LinkedIn has about 310 million active monthly users—which means it’s easy to find talents who are looking for change. Along with this, using a tool that acts as a plugin to source candidates through automation, track applications, & offer personalized JD options is a big win. NurtureBox is an all-in-one powerful tool that does all that is mentioned. If you want to have access to a tool that eases out regular recruiter tasks and provides a seamless recruiting experience—you should try NurtureBox!

The path to success is never short or easy. Only having an advanced tool doesn’t assure successful hiring. You need to learn about several tactics that apply on LinkedIn so that you find exceptional candidates. The right tactics often help in speeding up the process of hiring on LinkedIn. 

But before we dive into the tactics, let’s talk about why sourcing is fundamental. 

What is Sourcing?

The average time taken by a recruiter to source candidates for one open position is—13 hours. For recruiters and hiring managers, it is quite hectic to look for candidates, engage with them, and finally manage to get them onboard. Imagine the situation when it comes to hire for multiple roles. The job market is full of exceptional & qualified candidates, but the task of approaching the right candidates is tough. Why? As a recruiter, you need to cut through the competition of thousands of organizations trying to get to that one candidate. 

To put it in simple terms, sourcing is the process of hiring candidates that fit rightly into a position that is open in your organization. Sourcing includes everything from identifying the need for filling a position, recognizing the skills required for the role, approaching candidates, & offering the job. 

Currently, recruiters are constantly grappling with handling multiple recruitment tasks. Sourcing automation tools come as a great help to them. In order to hire quality talent and make a better hiring process, a sourcing automation tool is a must for all recruiters. Take the example of a phenomenal tool—NurtureBox—a powerhouse for all recruitment needs. Hiring managers can ward off the manual tasks of hiring with a sourcing automation tool. How? Read our blog on ‘Why Do We Need a Sourcing Automation Tool?’ 

Using a sourcing automation tool can reduce the inconsistencies & human errors often made while recruitment.  

Why Is Sourcing The Right Candidates Important?

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For a robust talent management system, sourcing stands crucial. Having a candidate database helps the organization to pick the right candidates during a vacancy. When you have the right set of candidates in place, it takes less time to engage with them & turn them into active hires. ‘Talent Scarcity’ is a term that poses a threat to most recruiters—they struggle to find suitable candidates for a role. Mostly, this happens when there aren’t enough skilled candidates. Recruiters don’t have sufficient time to invest in finding the right ones. 

Few factors that must be considered while sourcing candidates—

• Communicate directly with candidates during interview process to know their skills and strengths
• With the process of scouting candidates, recruiters get to control the quality of employees within the organization
• Maintain diversity while sourcing as you want individuals from various backgrounds to be part of the organization
• Sourcing allows interaction & engagement with candidates even before a position opens up
• Include popular sourcing platforms such as LinkedIn to connect with candidates from every sphere of industry

Parameters To Set While Looking For Candidates in LinkedIn

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LinkedIn is the go-to platform for candidates who wants to be seen by recruiters. For a job switch too, candidates often opt for LinkedIn to make their decision—about 75% of candidates did so. Recruiters too can make informed hiring decisions with data collected from LinkedIn. While the search for the ideal candidates isn’t that easy on the platform, recruiters can try out tools like NurtureBox. With an advanced tool in hand, seamless recruitment is possible. 

No doubt, for hiring managers it makes perfect sense to use LinkedIn—for the platform solely focuses on connecting with professionals around industries. Professionals who are on LinkedIn know their purpose & automatically are more keen to be reached out by recruiters. 

However, to use LinkedIn effectively, you need to know few pointers. 

1. Build an impressive company profile

Before anything, focus on building a robust company page on LinkedIn. Take cues from other company pages and see what’s trending—how they’re engaging viewers to their page. 

Company pages are strikingly different from a professional’s page. So, make it look like that. Add videos of office activities, recognitions, rewards, employee review, & more. A company page has followers, not connections—post content that engages your followers. A follower is 95% more likely to accept an InMail from your page. The chances of them responding to your message is more as they know you & regularly follow your content. 

Companies are largely focused on creating videos that tell the story. Videos act as a great way to interact with candidates, inform them about recent updates, and enable to stick around. Through such videos, recruiters can also post or notify about a recent job opening, requirements, and description. 

Fill the LinkedIn page with your company aesthetics—logo, caption, or relatable motivational quotes. Post content that reflects about your company ideals and ensure your followers connect to them! When you post regularly, followers will connect, engage, and find interest in your company.

2. Catch them when they’re online

Whether or not you’ve an engaging company page, the truth is—you need to interact with candidates. Hiring or sourcing starts only when you start the conversation & the candidates respond. The effectiveness of using LinkedIn for sourcing depends hugely on using it at the right time. LinkedIn has almost all professionals relevant to your requirements, but you need to have one-on-one conversations.

For instance, LinkedIn recommends sending InMail to prospects between 9 and 10 am in the weekdays. It’s quite understandable because we all spend the first hour of our workdays checking emails and notifications. 

Sourcing candidates in the weekends is not a good idea—avoid it unless they’ve agreed to schedule an interview. You won’t get much responses if you send out InMails on weekends.

3. Avoid sending generic messages 

Imagine you were receiving same kind of messages from a hundred recruiters—what are the chances you’d reply? Something different & unique always catches our attention. Same for the messages you send to candidates on LinkedIn—never forget to personalize! Personalization means sending carefully crafted InMails to each candidate. Not sending same impersonal messages to around ten people.

LinkedIn catches spammers easily, you may be blocked in case you don’t add personalization. Personalized emails do six times better than general emails. The impact of personalization on LinkedIn is no less—for example, referring to a mutual connection or a former common manager can do wonders. Automatically, you will have more responses this way.

It might take more time to write personalized messages, but that’s more beneficial than you think. Mention about a skillset that has caught your eye, tell them that their experience is what you’re exactly looking for, or comment on the recent blog they’ve written on their company website. With such an approach, you’re bound to have people responding to your InMails.

4. Join groups that are relevant 

For every company that runs its official page, there’s always a recruiter’s page that supports. Even if you have your company page up & running with regular updates, there are some restrictions. Recruiters often interact as individuals in groups and with candidates. Finding people in groups works effectively. Connecting with a candidate who are in the same group as yours greatly helps in getting a positive response.

For sourcing, use LinkedIn groups in a way that looks smooth. Look for and join groups that you can connect with easily. The group can be dedicated to sharing of job openings, talking about industry updates, networking, and more. There are groups even that are dedicated to one specific role. 

Interacting in a group after joining is a must. Being a silent audience wouldn’t earn you any brownie points. Suddenly coming up with a post won’t fetch you any responses—chances are slim. Stop by the posts and make sure you interact with the rest. Be a known page to the rest of the group members. 

Sourcing Tactics On LinkedIn To Find Candidates

1. Look for the older search results.

Sometimes candidates that you’re previously interested in may turn out to be the potential candidate for your new role. A good place to start on LinkedIn is your search history. Go back few pages and see who you searched for. This works when the first few pages on search shows up similar profiles. Anyhow, advanced tools like NurtureBox helps with this. It helps find relevant profiles with its sourcing automation feature. You won’t see same profile showing up when you’ve already passed on. 

2. Go to the end of a candidate’s profile.

Many recruiters make their decision based on what they see at the top of a profile. We suggest you dig deeper into a profile. Look for the candidate’s profile so that you don’t miss out on any information. From a profile, it’s easy to understand what a candidate brings to the table. Assessing whether the candidate is right for the organization or not is often found from their LinkedIn profile information.

3. Talk about your company’s USP at all times.

For organizations that are small or medium, you need to earn the attention of candidates. Send messages that include intrinsic details about what you got for them. Maybe include the latest happenings within the organization and future plans.This is a good practice if you want candidates to identify your company from a hundred others. Keep things to the point, add few links to the blog site, share anything to show how much you care for employees—like talking about mental health workshops.

4. Track candidate interest in your content.

If you have eyes on a particular candidate, ensure everything you share is clear. Vague information may ward them off, resulting in loss of interest. What most candidates look for now is a link or a video that has enough information about what you do as a company.Adding UTM codes to such links can help track these candidates. Tracking emails—whether or not a candidate opens it is easy too. Tracking candidates means you can understand when a candidate shows interest in your company—if they’re clicking on a link repeatedly.

5. Automate steps while interacting with candidates.

Scheduling interviews can be repetitive. That’s why with the power of automation, recruiters can smoothly schedule interviews on time. Keeping a calendar tool handy is a good way to avoid going back & forth. With LinkedIn Recruiter, provide your availability on InMail giving access to candidates as when they can be available for interviews. Use the time you save here in personalizing.

6. Consider including underrepresented groups.

Diversify candidate pool by including people from underrepresented groups such as LGBTQ+ community. Add keywords like ‘employee resource group’ to boolean strings to get a whole new set of page results. 

7. Uncover hidden candidates after rectifying errors.

Expand the keywords that you usually search with. Try to rectify the misspellings of few job titles and skills to uncover hidden candidates. For instance, many engineers put an extra ‘e’ while mentioning their title. Recruiters must be aware of any typo to find more people on LinkedIn.