Introduction
LinkedIn was first created to make recruitment easier. It’s a professional network where a large number of professionals share their expertise. In short: gold for recruiters on the hunt for talent. Although I don’t agree with the term “hunting”, LinkedIn lets you create real relationships and build up a powerful, up-to-date candidate pool. This article presents the recruitment strategy of Stepward, tested with its clients over the past two years, and shows you how to recruit on LinkedIn with it.
Recruiting on LinkedIn: between “candidate hunting” and “job offers”
All recruiters will tell you: “To recruit quickly and well, you must not skimp on levers”. But what do they mean by that?
Recruitment can be divided into 2 large families that are extremely closely linked, even if one of them is more capable of going it alone: inbound and outbound. Job offers vs candidate prospecting.
Job offers on job boards
1) What is a job board and how do I choose the right one?
Job boards are online platforms dedicated to recruitment. Some are free for employers, while others charge a fee. Each job board has its own characteristics, targeting different audiences. Their usefulness lies in the distribution of advertisements to a large number of candidates, enabling companies to enhance their image. Job advertisements are still the most common means of recruiting. According to a study by APEC, 88% of recruiters use job boards as their main source. The main services offered by these sites are the publication of job offers for candidates and the provision of CV libraries for recruiters. It’s essential to be well informed before posting a job offer.
There are recruitment platforms to suit different needs: some are universal, while others focus on specific sectors or profiles. To optimize recruitment, it’s essential to choose the right platform. Here are just a few examples:
- Apec: Private association dedicated to executive employment in France. It focuses mainly on management positions, with a large majority of applicants having a high level of education. Free of charge.
- Cadremploi: Recruitment site founded in 1991, mainly for executive recruitment. It is particularly popular with French executives. Chargeable.
- Indeed: The world’s leading job site, Indeed is a metasearch engine that lists ads from other job boards. It is suitable for all profiles. Paid and free.
- JobiJoba: Founded in 2007, this metasearch engine belongs to the HelloWork group and brings together job offers from over 400 job boards. Free of charge.
- Leboncoin: Online classifieds site that has gradually established itself in the job market. As a generalist, it offers a wide variety of positions. Chargeable.
- Meteojob: France’s leading job matching site, it uses an algorithm to match job offers with candidate profiles. Chargeable.
- Monster: One of the world’s largest job boards, founded in 1999. It is positioned as an HR solutions provider. Paid and free.
- Talent: a metasearch engine that centralizes almost all job offers available online. Free of charge.
- Pôle Emploi (now France Travail): France’s public employment service, created in 2008. It is aimed at all job seekers. Free of charge.
- HelloWork: One of France’s largest job boards, it allows you to target candidates by region and is particularly useful for SMEs. Chargeable.
- CleverConnect: a platform offering several specialized portals, such as Meteojob for job matching, Agefiph for people with disabilities, and Aeroemploiformation for the aeronautics industry. Chargeable.
Obviously, there are a multitude of recruitment platforms. However, determining the best platform depends on your recruitment requirements and the type of position to be filled. Selecting the right platform is crucial to your HR approach. Manually publishing offers on different sites can be tedious. In such situations, consider using specialized software solutions to automate ad distribution.
2) What are the advantages and limitations?
Job boards can be a good source of acquisition to maintain a constant candidate pool, but this entails 2 time-consuming and costly actions:
- Creating and maintaining a strong employer brand. Quite honestly, it’s very difficult to do if you’re a company with fewer than 200 employees.
- Sorting! Sorting through tons of CVs takes up a lot of your recruiters’ time. There are tools available, and some job boards even offer them natively, to apply to several different companies in the same way… You can imagine the quality of the applications…
To save time on these 2 aspects, we recommend 2 tools. No need to arm yourself with a battery of tools for this part.
Recommended tools:
- Monitor HR: This is a human resources management platform that offers solutions for optimizing the recruitment process, from posting job offers to selecting candidates, and for monitoring competitors’ job offers.
- Flatchr: This is an all-in-one recruitment tool that enables companies to publish job offers on multiple platforms, track applications and manage interviews.
Having worked with dozens of recruiters, we can say that job boards are a good complement for unsolicited applications, but when the need is really precise and, above all, urgent, this technique shows its limits. One of the biggest problems facing recruiters is the lack of visibility on the recruitment schedule, which is why candidate prospecting is the ideal solution.
Candidate hunting or prospecting:
A headhunter is a professional specializing in the recruitment of rare and specific profiles. Their main mission is to unearth talents who are not necessarily actively seeking employment, but who perfectly match a company’s needs for positions that are often strategic or require highly specialized skills.
Unlike a traditional recruiter, a headhunter is not content with the applications received or the profiles available on the usual platforms. They proactively seek out candidates, using their network, address book and various innovative sourcing techniques. The approach is often personalized and discreet, aiming to establish direct contact with the candidate to present an opportunity that may be of interest.
The distinction between headhunting and sourcing is essential. Sourcing focuses on finding candidates who have already shown an interest in new career opportunities, either by applying for vacancies or by having a presence on job search platforms. Headhunters, on the other hand, target “passive” candidates, i.e. those who are not actively looking, but who might be interested in a relevant proposal.
In short, the headhunter plays a crucial role in the recruitment landscape, providing expertise and a targeted approach to finding the ideal candidate for key positions within an organization.
Candidate prospecting is essential and, in some cases, the only solution available to you once you’ve done the rounds of your network or cooptation. Indeed, the more strategic or specific the profile you’re looking for, the less likely they are to apply. With the unemployment rate in France in 2023 at 7.2%, and even lower for executives, waiting for a candidate to apply is no longer enough.
One of the key differentiating factors is that 99% of good candidates are already employed somewhere and unaware that you’re looking to recruit. They don’t need to consult job offers, and they don’t know that you may have a more attractive professional opportunity than their current employer can offer them.
This large recruitment family requires the right equipment for your recruiters. Today, there are many tools available to facilitate sourcing and contacting candidates. Stepward has incorporated MirrorProfiles into its strategy and tool stack.
Here are the tools they recommend:
- 4 to 5 MirrorProfiles accounts equipped with an automation tool like Jarvi or Neostaff
- 1 Recruiter Lite license for effective sourcing
- n8n and Captain Data to export Recruiter Lite searches and build a pre-ATS with Airtable
- 1 Lemlist or Emelia license for the emailing part
- WhatsApp API for telephone follow-up
To find out more about this technique, check out their comprehensive article on optimizing your recruitment process.
For our part, let’s focus on the LinkedIn channel, the nerve center of the talent war. As we’ve seen, betting all your candidate acquisition on job boards is a bad idea today, both to optimize your recruiters’ time and to fill your needs quickly. Candidate prospecting will keep spreading in the coming years, so it’s up to you to position yourself quickly. Let’s find out how!
How can you effectively structure and deploy your candidate prospecting on LinkedIn?
Candidate prospecting has many similarities to setting up a customer prospecting campaign on LinkedIn. The difference lies in 2 aspects:
- Databases are worked on more intensively in recruitment, as acceptance and response statistics are double those of prospecting campaigns.
- At the end of the contact loops (at the end of the acquisition funnel), it’s a recruiter, not a salesperson, who responds to the person.
Once that’s said, you should understand a little more what I’m getting at. If you haven’t already, take a look at this article on prospecting on LinkedIn.
The key to structuring your candidate prospecting lies in centralizing data and synchronizing your candidate pool. The basic idea is to save your recruiters time so that they can handle more discovery interviews. To do this, use Airtable to centralize your databases, then, to qualify them, I recommend the following steps:
- Tag the candidate who has been added to an acquisition campaign
- Mark when they accept the connection request
- Update their status when they reply to your recruiter
- Your recruiter simply attaches a tag such as “Interview to be scheduled”, “Not interested for the moment”, etc.
These 4 steps can be automated, and that’s the icing on the cake: automation tools handle the first 3, and the 4th happens in your ATS or CRM, where your recruiter tags each conversation.
LinkedIn messaging was not designed for this kind of follow-up, especially when several accounts are running at the same time. Centralize the conversations in your ATS or CRM (or in the inbox of a multi-account automation tool), categorize each candidate with tags and sync the statuses with your pipeline. That’s what keeps the process readable and saves your recruiters from juggling several inboxes.
Once you’ve set up your process and tested it by hand on a dozen or so potential candidates, you need to scale up. In fact, this method is only worthwhile if you want to move fast. Stepward aims to recruit in less than 3 weeks for its clients, so there’s no time to lose.
Let’s take the example of a client looking to recruit an experienced Product Owner in Paris.
Once you’ve done your research on Recruiter Lite, you’ll find yourself with a database of 1,300 potential candidates.
If you use your recruiter’s LinkedIn account, it will take 13 weeks to contact everyone… That’s far too long! On average, 3 weeks pass between the first exchange and the contract proposal. In other words, the Product Owner who is contacted in week 13 will be a long way behind in getting the job, even if he’s better.
This is where MirrorProfiles comes in: you can equip your recruiter with 5 MirrorProfiles accounts, and the 13-week acquisition period comes down to 2 to 3 weeks. LinkedIn limits each account to around 100 to 120 connection requests per week, so your weekly volume is proportional to the number of accounts.
With an average acceptance rate of 53% and a response rate of 67%, your recruiter will have enough responses to book around ten first interviews in the first 2 weeks.
The other advantage is that, by using this method, your recruiter builds up, without even realizing it, a base of potential candidates who will be of interest later on. If you were to recruit another Product Owner 2 months later, all they’d have to do is follow up, with 1 click, all those who had accepted the connection request during the first campaign.
The only reason not to use this recruitment method is if you’re recruiting for a type of position that isn’t digitized, such as multi-skilled logistics staff. They have very few LinkedIn accounts, so this method won’t work.
Conclusion
The recruitment landscape has changed considerably with the advent of professional social networks, particularly LinkedIn. In this context, Stepward’s recruitment strategy is proving to be an innovative and effective approach, tested with its clients. Job boards, while useful, are showing their limitations in the face of the speed and precision required in today’s recruitment. “Candidate hunting”, or prospecting, on the other hand, offers a proactive approach to reaching talent who are not necessarily actively searching, but who could be the perfect match for a given position.
Effective candidate prospecting on LinkedIn relies on rigorous structuring and the use of appropriate tools. MirrorProfiles, in particular, gives recruiters the dedicated accounts they need to contact a large number of potential candidates quickly, with a volume proportional to the number of accounts. What’s more, automated processes and centralized data ensure optimal candidate management, reducing recruitment times.
In short, in a world where competition for talent is fierce, it’s imperative for companies to adapt and adopt recruitment methods that are both modern and efficient. Stepward’s strategy, based on candidate prospecting on LinkedIn with several accounts, is proving to be a relevant response to these challenges, making recruitment faster, more targeted and better quality. If you’re interested, but managing multiple LinkedIn accounts can scare off recruiters, here’s a complementary article.
