#10 Tips for Faster Hiring and Find the Right Fit Quickly

LinkedIn's goal has always been to help recruiters do their jobs faster, easier, and simultaneously find the most suitable candidates. Here are 10 tips to help recruiters achieve this:

1. Enable "Fair Play" Recruiting with Name and Photo Blinding

Last year, Recruiter users could blind candidate names and photos to ensure everyone is evaluated based on skills and qualifications rather than social identity or appearance.

Now, LinkedIn provides additional functionality for admins or any job post owner to toggle photo display on/off for each individual job post. Enabling this will not affect all jobs you have running - it only displays on the jobs and times you want.

LinkedIn emphasized that not just anyone can go in and turn this feature on or off whenever they want. You have to be an admin or job post owner. After choosing to use this feature, you can turn it off anytime you want. This added flexibility in anonymizing applicant names is seen as a major step forward for companies with diverse hiring strategies.

2. Narrow Your Candidate Pool's Gender Gap with Diversity Nudges

LinkedIn clients often focus on challenges finding a talented and diverse workforce, starting with achieving gender equality. Diversity Nudges (introduced August), will notify recruiters if their candidate pool is over 55% one gender, sharing the precise gender breakdown.

But it doesn't stop there - this feature also provides suggestions on filters to add skills, companies or locations that would balance gender in your candidate pool.

Let's say you want to hire electrical engineers in Palo Alto and your initial applicant pool consists mainly of men. Diversity Nudges could suggest adding additional skills filters for data analysis, analytical skills and Simulink. This would help increase the number of women in your group. Alternatively, Diversity Nudges may recommend Seattle, Austin and New York City - three areas with higher numbers of female electrical engineers. These new filters would not cause you to lose any of your original search results - they would only serve to supplement them.

3. Stay in Touch with Candidates from Out of Office with Recruiter Inbox

LinkedIn is pleased to share Recruiter Inbox out-of-office functionality has been fully upgraded. When away from the office for periods, you can also notify candidates which colleague will be responsible for contacting them in your absence.

4. Record Notes and Reminders in Inbox with New Quick Buttons

Recruiter users can boost workflow efficiency by constantly updating and maintaining key candidate details in message context. Leverage Quick Buttons to add notes and reminders without leaving your message thread.

You used to be able to do this before, but it would take three or four mouse clicks. Now you can do it in just one quick and convenient click.

And to look forward to even more exciting features coming soon, LinkedIn noted that in the near future, Recruiter users will have the ability to customize which buttons appear as their Quick Actions.

5. Preview Personalized InMail Messages Before Sending

Recruiter allows mass personalizing InMails with variables like job title, job location and even candidate name. What you couldn't do is preview the message to see how it looks to the recipient.

Now you have the option to preview your message before sending. Recruiter users should note candidate name variables can currently only be previewed when sending 1:1 messages.

This new preview feature is an enhancement to the messaging composer, allowing you to minimize errors in your bulk messages. This is hugely important because making a great first impression is so vital when initially contacting a candidate. And in today's candidate-centric job market, that initial impression matters more than ever.

6. Recommended Matches Feature

Recommended Matches are an indispensable source of candidates for recruiters and are continually improving to get better each day.

When you are searching for candidates for a particular job, each new activity you perform will trigger the Recommended Matches feature to canvass your LinkedIn network looking for candidates with matching qualities to what you seek. Then, based on your activity of who you've saved, messaged or hidden, Recommended Matches will continue to get smarter.

This is tremendously helpful for hard to fill positions. Recruiter will send you a maximum of 25 daily candidate recommendations. Encouragingly, recommended candidates who match have a 35% higher InMail response rate than candidates only discovered through Recruiter search.

7. Limit repetitive actions by using Saved Searches

LinkedIn is always proud to introduce Recruiter's Saved Searches as it saves immense time and effort in finding suitable candidates. By saving your searches, you can easily re-access them without having to recall which filter combinations you previously used. And once a search is saved, Recruiter will automatically notify you of any new candidates matching your criteria.

Recruiter will proactively scout for candidates on your behalf and alert you of matches through both email and directly within the Recruiter dashboard.

8. Use Recruiter Mobile's Home Screen Shortcuts to Pick Up Where You Left Off

The Recruiter mobile app allows recruiters on the go to quickly accomplish tasks during short breaks, between meetings, interviews and calls, as well as anytime they are away from their desktop.

And when you return to your device, Recruiter now provides two shortcuts to help you easily and quickly resume from where you left off. The first is a placeholder link to your most active job posting with the most candidates you've saved in the past 36 hours. Tapping it links to a bulk InMail composition page where those previously saved candidates are pre-populated.

The second placeholder reads "Continue Search" to remind you of your most recent search and indicate how many filters you had applied.

9. Automatically schedule saved reports to email relevant stakeholders regularly

Now, Recruiter users can schedule saved reports to be emailed automatically to a customized list of addresses. These reports can detail InMail performance, Jobs, Usage, Sources and Channels metrics.

You can customize the report subject line and include a personalized introductory message providing additional context. So you may want to kick off your report with a note like "Hey finance team, here are the active job postings and key stats from last month - we crushed it."

Select the time of day and timezone to schedule reports as well as start and end dates. Then choose a reporting frequency - say every Monday weekly. Scheduled reporting reduces the time needed to surface important insights and provides more transparency within companies.

10. Leverage new reporting filters for quick, easy critical data access

Recruiters can utilize new filters within Recruiter Reports to enrich their most important data. There are new filters for user role, job role, job status and Account Hub role types. But most importantly, admins can now create groups within the Account Hub, allowing easy viewing of reports by group and removing the need to manually select each group member each time reports need running for multiple users.

All new filters can be applied to these reports: Usage, InMail, Jobs, Talent Pipeline, Summary, Custom Users, Custom Registrants and Custom Projects. You can access filters on the left side corner of the report.

Summary

LinkedIn hopes you leverage all the new features and functionality added to Recruiter. But even utilizing just a few targeted applications, LinkedIn believes you will find yourself working faster and more efficiently, searching for and hiring suitable candidates with less effort.

(According to LinkedIn)