Introduction
LinkedIn was first created to facilitate recruitment. It’s a professional network where a large number of professionals can share their expertise. In short! Gold for recruiters on the hunt for talent. Although I don’t agree with the term “hunting”, LinkedIn allows you to create real relationships and build up a powerful, up-to-date candidate pool. This article presents the recruitment strategy of Stepward recruitment strategy, proven with more than 30 customers in just 2 years.
Recruiting on Linkedin, between "Candidate hunt" and "Job offer
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 Jobboards :
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 advertising site that has gradually established itself in the job market. As a generalist, it offers a wide variety of products. 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: 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. Manual publication of offers on different sites can be tedious. In such situations, consider using specialized software solutions to automate ad delivery.
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:
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Create and maintain a strong employer brand. Quite honestly, it’s very difficult to do if you’re a company with fewer than 200 employees.
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Sorting! Sorting through tons of CVs takes up a lot of your recruiters’ time. There are tools available, and some Jobboards 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 in working 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, the Jobboards solution is a good complement for unsolicited applications, but when the need is really precise and above all fast, 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. Its 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. He proactively seeks out candidates, using his 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 more they won’t 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. In 2023, there are many tools available to facilitate sourcing and contacting candidates. Stepward has incorporated the use of 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 Recruter Lite license for effective sourcing
- N8N and Captain to scrape Recruter Lite and build 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, in 2023, betting all your candidate acquisition on job boards is a bad idea, both to optimize your recruiters’ time and to fill your needs quickly. Candidate prospecting will become increasingly widespread in 2023 and 2024, 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 is based on 2 aspects:
- Databases are worked on more intensively in recruitment, as acceptance and response statistics are doubled compared with 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 manage more uncovered interviews. To do this, use Airtable to centralize your databases, then to qualify your databases, I recommend the following steps:
Tag the candidate who has launched an acquisition campaign
Mark when it accepts the connection request
Update its status when it replies to your recruiter
Your recruiter will simply attach a tag such as “Interview to be scheduled”, “Not interested for the moment”, etc.
These 4 steps can – and this is the icing on the cake – be automated. Via automation tools for the first 3 steps and the 4th via MirrorChat.
Faced with the shortcomings of LinkedIn messaging, notably the management of multiple accounts and the absence of pre-recorded responses, MirrorChat, from the MirrorProfiles platform, presents itself as the ideal solution.
It not only makes up for these shortcomings, but also goes one step further by offering advanced functionalities:
- Centralize messages from different accounts
- Automated responses for smoother communication
- Optimal organization of leads thanks to tag-based categorization.
- Native or Webhook synchronization with your ATS or CRM.
In short, MirrorChat transcends the concept of a simple alternative to position itself as a genuine evolution in the world of professional messaging on LinkedIn (yes, yes, in all modesty).
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 interesting if you want to strike fast and hard. Stepward recruits in less than 3 weeks for its customers, so there’s no time to lose.
Let’s take the example of a customer 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 will be contacted in week 13, will be a long way behind to get 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 is reduced to 2 weeks. In fact, 1 Linkedin account is capable of sending between 100 and 150 connection requests per week.
With an average acceptance rate of 53% and a response rate of 67%, he’ll 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 unknowingly introduces potential candidates who will be of interest later on. If you were to recruit another Product Owner 2 months later, all he’d have to do is relaunch, with 1 click, all those who had accepted his connection request during his 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, with a proven track record with numerous customers. 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, stands out as an indispensable tool for maximizing the effectiveness of this approach, enabling recruiters to contact a large number of potential candidates in record time. 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, guaranteeing rapid, targeted and quality recruitment. If you’re interested, but managing multiple Linkedin accounts can scare off recruiters, here’s a complementary article.
