Ever since LinkedIn came along and disrupted the recruitment industry with products like Recruiter, dynamic careers pages, and targeted job slots, we have been asking – what’s next?
Unfortunately, what’s next consisted of a whole stream of updates that limited the way we can use LinkedIn. Rather that bitching, after all, this was a necessary move to commercialise LinkedIn, look for how you can drive better value with some of their new updates.
Data ownership!
It feels like forever that I have been encouraging companies to own their data and then to take control of it.
Owning data – yes, this is the age-old ATS, CRM and Marketing tech conversation. My advice is, EVERY single time you pay to attract candidates and leads; your aim is to capture their data on your systems. (Pay attention to GDPR though – search “GDPR recruitment campaigns” on YouTube to find my explanatory videos.)
Taking control of data – there is no point in having data if it is not useful. To make your data useful, you need to be able to use it in the future to create reports, intelligence, talent pools and to communicate with those talent pools. (Search #tahack recruitment on YouTube to see how companies are doing this.)
The current LinkedIn strategy seems to be to keep all data on LinkedIn:
- LinkedIn advertising campaigns are purely focused on ‘follow us’ and LI careers page clicks – all data stays with LinkedIn.
- Their new talent landing pages drive people into your Recruiter Projects – all data stays with LinkedIn.
- Recruiter projects encourage you to talent pool on Recruiter – all data stays with LinkedIn.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand why they do this. LinkedIn believe they have the best tool to pipeline talent and they want to increase your reliance on their products.
But…if the data is on LinkedIn, you need to pay to engage with your talent pools…every time.
This means you need to attract a follower…then push a sponsored update to them…then have a job advertised to them…then send them an InMail…then…then…then…you see where I am going here? Every action costs more, and so your cost rises to attract.
So, how can we use LinkedIn to deliver data to our systems and ROI in our strategy?
1. Targeting – sponsored updates
This can be done through both your LinkedIn account manager (if you have one) and through the LinkedIn ads platform. LinkedIn’s ads platform is really meant to be used by marketers and sales people, but there is no reason not to use it for recruitment too.
Follow these steps:
- Decide what you want to drive traffic to. This could be a landing page or job advert. I recommend you drive traffic to a landing page so that you can convert candidate leads, rather than just applicants.
- To do this, you will need software to create the landing pages, data capture forms and a database to follow-up with your leads. Again, visit the #tahack channel on YouTube to see how this is done.
- You will pay anywhere from £1 to £15 per click, but bear in mind if you set up the targeting well, then your audience will be perfect…none of theses ‘apply for everything’ applicants, only quality candidates.
2. In-Mails – not just for recruiter users
Ok, you might spot a trend here. Yes, we are going to use the Ads platform again and, yes, I believe this is meant more for marketers than recruiters but hey, it is there, it works, so why not get the value while it lasts!
Within the ads platform, select the InMail option, create your cold InMail, select your audience, and choose how much budget to commit.
You will notice that this option is great value at anywhere from 50p to a few quid (dollars for my Aussie/USA colleagues) but you pay per send, so you will need to think carefully about the best way to convert a send into a candidate lead. Here are a couple of ideas:
- Agency: Provide a salary survey. Within the InMail, ask the questions ‘Are you getting paid the market rate?’ along with some nice fluffy and engaging copy, then offer the recipient the salary survey as a download behind a data capture form, thus converting them into a lead.
- Corporate: Have your hiring manager, their head of function or a successful person in your business create valuable content and, as above, offer it as a download. Think along the lines of ‘5 skills that the *target audience* need to develop quickly to address *industry changes/challenges*’ or ‘how to grow your career quickly as a *target audience* without losing your work-life balance’.
Just some ‘off the top of my head’ ideas. I am sure that with a bit of brainstorming, you can come up with some ace lead conversion tactics.
3. Re-targeting – The secret sauce
Ok, not everyone will be able to do this, but this is where you can make use of drop-offs and drive serious engagement. Firstly, you need to install the LinkedIn pixel on your website, and you will need to reach out to you website owner/agency to help with this.
Once you have installed the pixel, every visitor to your website and careers pages will be recorded. The real strength here is that you can now use this audience to push out advertising in the future. Here are a couple of ways to use this:
- If a person visits a job advert but doesn’t land on the ’thank you for applying page”, then they didn’t apply and were a ‘drop-off’. Use this audience to drive drop-offs to content that will encourage them to see you as an employer of choice and help them WANT to work for you. Alternatively, just remind them that they still need to apply!
- Run an ads campaign to your target audience, and send them to a landing page. Once someone converts into a candidate lead, send them to a thank you page. Create a pixel audience of people that visit this page and remove this audience from future campaigns, as, after all, they are on your database so you can contact them without paying LinkedIn!
- There are some way cooler things you can do, but, by starting with the above, you will get to grips with how it works.
So, there you go; some helpful ways of increasing your recruitment marketing ROI on LinkedIn. If you want to know more, then reach out to me on LinkedIn.
