LinkedIn charges handsomely on job ads, it does provide valuable reach but the what if I told you there are several ways to achieve the desired outcome without incurring any costs? Here is how to Hire on LinkedIn for Free
Here is the catch. We as HR recruiters are faced with an everyday challenge: recruitment is an expense. Certainly, business owners tend to be allergic to such term. You need to exercise cost-effectiveness when it comes to attracting talents. However, limited budgets do limit your reach to rich quality talent pools such as LinkedIn job marketplace. LinkedIn charges handsomely on job ads. Surely, it does provide valuable reach. But what if I told you there are several ways to achieve the desired outcome without incurring any costs? Just follow this step-by-step guide to hire on LinkedIn for free. Let us know how they where helpful at the end.
Step 1: Laying the foundation, Establishing the Network
Nothing good comes easy. This step takes a great deal of patience and commitment. But it pays, or for the least part, doesn’t make you pay. You need to open channels with prospect candidates. For that end you should aim for two distinct objectives.
1. Extend your Network Reach
The first and easy part extend the Reach to people who know you. LinkedIn has a neural network built on people you know, and the people they know at several degrees. It encourages people to add each other to their networks based on mutual connections and interests. That is something you can use to your advantage.
Encourage people in your organization to add new connections and accept connections from other as much as possible. You may even reward your employees for their networking skills. No we don’t mean money, you are reading this article to cut costs, remember? Just recognition on the company’s social media would suffice. It will also help you big time in the next part.
2. Promote Your ‘Employer of Choice’ Stance
The second, and tricky part, is to establish your stance as ‘Employer of Choice’ or at least ‘Employer of Interest’. In that sense you need to work on your company’s LinkedIn page. Populate the ‘about’ and ‘contact’ sections as well as the necessary profile imagery. You should immediately start posting content about how your employees are happy with their jobs. Focus on what your target candidate would want to have or try, and post content saying that you have it. Try to use words from your employees rather than the official spoken tone. Video content of their happy habitat would greatly reinforce the desired impact. Make your company look like a place where the quality candidate would love to be.
Kickstarting your network can be achieved in a very limited time. However, it is an ongoing mandate. You need to invest at least an average of 2 hours per week to engage your audience and keep channels open. The frequency of your posts, your responses and comments stimulation highly increase the probability of being seen by distant LinkedIn neural networks and keeping them engaged. Be informative, educative, interesting, and add value to your audience as much as possible.
Step 2: Identify your recruitment task perimeters.
Before you engage in the recruitment task, it goes without saying that you need to understand what is requested from you.
Perimeter 1: Scope
you need to draw several spectrums such as years of experience, degree of technical knowledge depth versus general knowledge, and other special prerequisite qualifications the candidate needs to possess. It is also imperative to identify if this is a new job or a replacement to a current position.
Perimeter 2: Time identifiers
That includes the time window available for recruitment defining how urgent it is to fill in the job. In addition, identify the contract length for the job and the start date. Then there are variable perimeters specific to the type of job subject, such as the degree of Discretion, particularly in the case of replacement job for an underperforming employee or executive, and how open you are to headhunt from your Competitors’ talent pools. Walmart, for instance, hunts 15% of its management positions from other retailers.
Step 3: Explore your Options to Hire on LinkedIn for Free
There are two main options to post a job and, moreover, get the right candidates’ attention without paying for expensive job ads and getting charged for unqualified applicants showering the internet with their mass blind application. Now that you have your network established and you know what to look for, just like any head hunting. It is hunting, right? You need to lure the right candidates in. Start adding specific content about the job you have.
1. Post about the job in a post
The first option to hire on LinkedIn for Free is to post about the job in a post. Everyone following your page will most likely be seeing it. Be mindful that you should not add a link to the job in the post body as it could be subject to penalty by LinkedIn, however you can add it in the comments, a direct link to your landing job page at your own website.
Encourage your employees to share the post on their personal profiles as well. Especially employees with professions relevant to the job description in hand. The post can be either in text with a descriptive image or, more effectively, as a short video. You can doodle videos for free or very limited budgets, or just make a short talk video using your cell phone’s camera. Employ hashtags to your interest to link your post to the right keywords in your candidates search, especially for highly specialized jobs. The rule of thumb here is that people believe people more than corporate bodies, especially when they are in their friendship network.
2. Let LinkedIn job marketplace do it for you
The second option is, you’re going to love it, to embrace the third stratagem of the Art of War, kill with a borrowed sword. LinkedIn job marketplace strives to be and stay the number one job board platform globally. To sell their job advertising products they need to have the largest pool of candidates to pick from. On the other hand, to become the first destination of choice for quality job seekers they need to have a constant stream of job offerings. Hence, they are constantly scouring the internet to find job posts at other websites and publish them on their own platform.
Make sure LinkedIn diggers find your job post landing page. Use search engine optimization ‘SEO’ to your advantage. Put yourself in their shoes and think of the keywords they will search for every morning to find new job opportunities. Still, certainly, LinkedIn promotes paid ads to appear before the ones they were digging out of the platform. But when we are targeting a highly specialized job description, few if any other search results will supersede your tasked job post.
