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The ultimate guide to optimizing & analyzing your recruiter brand on LinkedIn. Discover everything you need to attract top talent with an optimized LinkedIn profile.
It’s no secret that LinkedIn is one of the most effective tools you, as a recruiter, can use to grow your network and attract the best talent. However, top candidates are already inundated with other recruiters’ messages.
If you want to reach them, you need to stand out. You need to make the candidates come to you.
How? With an attractive recruiter brand.
You already know your LinkedIn profile should be properly optimized, full of valuable information, and running on a healthy diet of relevant and engaging content. The problem is, if you are using your personal profile (and we hope you are), LinkedIn won’t tell you if you’re going in the right direction.
Today, we are here to show you how to analyze your LinkedIn profile and extract insights that will reinforce your recruiter brand.
You may be familiar with the marketing term “buyer’s journey.” As a recruiter, you need to consider the candidate’s journey.
Think about what a candidate will do when they land on your profile after a search or after you’ve messaged them. What do they want to see in a competitive climate where job offers are rescinded as quickly as they are offered, and 52% of companies take three weeks or more to hire a candidate?
Your candidate wants to trust you. They want to see that you’re the one who could help them land their dream job. In turn, this means that if your profile looks like all the others out there, your chances of connecting and, by implication, making a hire are slim to none. It also means you’ll need to communicate your mission, values, and what you want to achieve as a recruiter.
These things establish your recruiter brand, show why you’re successful, and make you stand out from the crowd. They’re what makes candidates click the “Accept Connection” button.
Just because the whole world knows about keywords doesn’t mean they’re using them right.
Similarly, if you want to effectively leverage everything LinkedIn offers to build your recruiter brand, you’ll need to follow a series of fundamental steps to provide the right information to make your profile effective.
The first thing candidates see, whether it’s in search results or when they visit your profile, is your profile picture. In fact, the importance of a profile picture can’t be understated, especially when you consider that the mere presence of a profile picture makes your profile 14 times more likely to be viewed by others.
Think of your profile picture as the first touchpoint candidates will encounter, much like an eCommerce store’s website. And don’t forget, first impressions count. As such, the more professional, approachable, and friendly your profile picture is, the more likely candidates will be to engage with your profile.
Ideally, you should opt for a headshot taken by a professional photographer. Sure, this does cost money, but it is a business expense that could help your company deal with the talent shortage, making it more than a worthwhile investment. With every new view, you get more candidates into the pipeline.
If a professional headshot isn’t possible, use a photo you’ve taken yourself. Avoid filters and retouching software, and wear appropriate clothing with a facial expression that conveys your approachable nature.
Depending on your industry, you may have to be more or less formal. Adjust the approach based on your company culture. If you’re very much in a startup space that prides itself on a friendly atmosphere, there is no need to don a suit. Business casual will do.
No one connects with an unsmiling face. A friendly and authentic approach always wins in informal company cultures.
The next thing candidates will see after your photo is your headline. As such, it’s crucial that your headline embodies the impact you want to make as a professional. In other words, your headline is your mission statement.
Think about your role creatively. Kimberly Butler describes herself as a “Career Match-Maker,” a very candidate-first approach. Instead of telling them what they can do for her company, Butler positions herself as the candidate’s ally.
Use your headline to inspire the right candidate. Instead of describing the open roles as clinical research, Alexandra Sazonova embodies the company’s mission to reimagine healthcare. You’ll notice the headline isn’t overused or full of jargon. It’s human and direct. To get inspiration, talk to your team members and staff:
Show your personality. You’ll be quite close with the candidate during the hiring process, and they will use you to evaluate the rest of the company. Tejal Wagadia does a fantastic job of this, relating to the candidates on multiple levels.
As a recruiter, you represent your company, but it’s comprised of people. When candidates receive your connection request, they won’t look at your company’s financial statements (right away).
First, they’ll evaluate if you seem the type of person they would like to talk to.
Once candidates have looked at your profile picture, read your headline, and are still on your page, they’ll read your summary. This is your opportunity to show them who you are and what you want to achieve.
Considering the above, remember several things when writing your summary. For one, you should make it about you and not your company. So, show them who you are. Share your passions and goals. It’s your brand that will attract the best applicants. Be authentic; the best candidates will see through clichés.
Also, while it’s certainly not a mistake to write your summary in the third person, you’ll be far better served when you write it in the first person. This gives your summary a personal touch and allows you to be yourself.
A candidate won’t just interact with you on LinkedIn because of the company you work for, your qualifications, or your experience. They’ll get in touch because they see you as the person capable of finding them their dream job.
As a result, you must show your successes on your LinkedIn profile. When you do, you’ll show candidates that you’re good at what you do and how you can help them. Additionally, a proven track record will demonstrate trust and credibility in a way that qualifications can’t.
Get recommendations from previous candidates or colleagues who can write positive, authentic reviews on your profile. Consider getting endorsements for the skills listed on your profile if they’re relevant to the candidate’s field.
Getting an endorsement in “active listening” is a cliche; getting an endorsement for “Salesforce automation” when you are hiring a Revenue Operations manager shows you took the time to understand the field you are hiring for.
Creating engaging content is one of the most effective strategies to build your recruiter brand on LinkedIn. Publish posts where you voice your opinion and give advice to the audience or, in other words, prospective candidates.
What content should you post? Think of critical questions the candidates in your industry have. Perhaps they’re wondering about switching to your industry from a different field (many migrate to tech). Maybe they have concerns about preparing for their first few interviews.
Use your LinkedIn profile to demystify their conundrums, signaling your expertise and giving candidates a valuable resource on their career journeys. It’s this content that will make them come back to your profile when they need advice or have new questions.
Tell candidates what they can expect. Every candidate wonders:
Recruiters often avoid these questions, especially if they know their company takes a long time to hire. However, other good things about your candidate's experience will make up for any shortcomings, especially if you explain them clearly.
When you share content, share relevant or inspirational content with your audience. Share an industry trend and provide your opinion. Get thoughts from your team and highlight their experience. You’ll maintain engagement without the filler content that makes candidates put you firmly in the “just like everyone else” basket.
Always personalize your messages or connection requests to candidates. We live in a time of mass-sent cold emails and direct messages. We know our information is scraped with a lead generation tool.
Less of this:
And more messages that make the recipient feel valued:
Unfortunately, a fully-automated candidate generation process will leave the candidate feeling like they’re just another number. Even though you are busy, personalizing your messaging to top candidates shows respect.
(And it works like a charm. Personalized messages get higher response rates than their generic counterparts.)
Likewise, when you receive messages from candidates, respond quickly with the information they need. This will make them feel valued and prove that you care about matching them to the perfect role.
There is nothing like a recruiter who poses as friendly and approachable, only to leave a potential candidate on “read” for days or come off as impolite just because they aren’t actively hiring for the role. Stay consistent. It’s a part of your brand.
Once you create your LinkedIn recruitment strategy, it’s time to evaluate it. How do you know if you got it right? You're on the right track if your pipeline is filling up with candidates. However, results can quickly dry up if you don't know what drives them.
That’s where analytics comes in.
Analyzing your LinkedIn impressions, shares, engagement, and other metrics shows you how well your profile performs and how effectively your content increases your engagement.
In turn, you can use these insights to improve your positioning.
Considering the above, there are two ways to obtain LinkedIn insights:
LinkedIn's data is the most common way to analyze your profile and content’s performance. You'll find basic statistics relating to your profile and your content, including:
● Post impressions
● Reactions
● Comments
● Search appearances
● Profile views
● Basic profile statistics
Unfortunately, that’s as far as LinkedIn goes. You won’t find any statistics about your engagement rate, historical data, number of shares, link clicks, or the like. In other words, you won't see the complete picture from LinkedIn analytics alone.
If you want more valuable insights than those from LinkedIn, use a dedicated analytics tool. Inlytics, a tool specifically developed to extract LinkedIn insights for personal profiles, shows you why candidates engage:
Once you log in to Inlytics, you’ll find the most important metrics on your dashboard. You’ll effortlessly understand your overall performance at a glance. In addition to basic metrics like post impressions, you’ll see:
● Your engagement rate. This metric shows the percentage of people interacting with your content. The higher this number, the more engaging your content.
● Top posts. This presents your top-performing posts, sorted by engagement rate. You’ll learn what content is most engaging and resonates most with your audience. Based on this, you can then focus on creating similar content.
Besides the metrics mentioned above, Inlytics provides in-depth content performance metrics far beyond those LinkedIn offers. These metrics include:
● Historic post impressions. How have your post impressions changed over time? Are more or fewer people reading them?
● Historic post reactions. How have your post reactions changed over time in relation to your impressions, comments, and shares? Is your content more inspirational or humorous? Which content type produces the best engagement results?
● Historic comments. How do your comments correlate with other metrics? Are more candidates truly engaging with your content?
● Historic engagement rate per post. With this metric, you’ll see how the engagement rate of any post has changed over time. In other words, you’ll learn how your posts perform, and you’ll be able to run experiments and see their impact. It’s a practical way to create a strong recruiter brand strategy.
● Timeline content table. Get a visual representation of your content performance. You won’t just see which posts performed best but also at what times your content performed best.
● Content overview. Your content overview allows you to visualize post performance and engagement levels on a per-post level.
Inlytics crunches the numbers for you, but it also extracts insights with enhanced profile statistics, so you log in and know exactly how to improve:
● Profile recommendations. Is your profile optimized? What can you do to make it even better? Profile recommendations make your profile as appealing and engaging as possible.
● Profile scoring. Based on the profile recommendations Inlytics provides, it also calculates your profile score. The engineers behind the tool developed a scoring system to show your profile's overall degree of optimization. Once you’ve ticked all the boxes, you can focus on creating meaningful connections - not worrying about keywords.
● Score per category. In addition to profile scoring, you can also look at a visualization of your profile’s optimization, showing your profile’s scoring for every relevant category.
● Connections. How many connections do you have, and how has that figure changed over time? Correlate it with your post metrics, and you’ll find the approach that candidates respond well to.
● Connections chart. When have you gained the most connections? Identify trends in the way your connection count grows.
● Followers. See how your follower count changed over time.
● Follower and Following chart. With this chart, you’ll get a visualization of your historical following and follower data.
There’s a shortage of candidates, but not of recruiters. A strong recruiter brand is the best solution for demonstrating what makes you and your company different.
But to connect with and successfully hire top talent, you need to know what makes them tick.
Inlytics gives you a glance behind the scenes of your LinkedIn profile. Where LinkedIn only offers basic analytics for personal profiles, Inlytics becomes your personal LinkedIn performance assistant. Extract insights, get insights other recruiters don’t have and grow your network.
