Guide to Using LinkedIn Recruiter

What is LinkedIn Recruiter

LinkedIn Recruiter is one of Sourcegraph’s recruitment tools. It is a collaborative tool that we use to search for, connect with, and reach out to prospective candidates.

LinkedIn Recruiter Access

We have unlimited LinkedIn Recruiter licenses for all Sourcegraph teammates. A recruiter license allows you to view unlimited candidate profiles and send unlimited messages to prospective candidates. This is a helpful tool for hiring managers or any teammates who want to help with recruiting outreach efforts.

For Teammates - How to request a LinkedIn Recruiter license

For Talent Team - How to assign a LinkedIn Recruiter license:

Any member of the Talent team can grant teammates access to a recruiter license. Simply follow these steps:

  • Step 1: Click ‘Recruiter’ in the top right corner of your LinkedIn homepage
  • Step 2: Hover over your photo in the top right of the LinkedIn Recruiter homepage, then click ‘Manage users in account center’
  • Step 3: Click the ‘Add New Users’ button and then select ‘Add new users by email’
  • Step 4: Enter the requesting teammate’s email, select the appropriate level of access, then select ‘Confirm’

Integrations needed

How to use LinkedIn Recruiter as a Recruiter / Sourcer

During onboarding you should have received an invitation to activate your LinkedIn Recruiter license. When you’re activating your license, ensure you have the following permissions: Hiring Project Creator License, Recruiter Searcher, Product Settings Admin, and Public Notes Viewer. If you don’t have these permissions, request it via slack message in the #talent-team-private-channel.

Before you jump in and start building projects and sending inmails, become familiar with:

How to create and manage LinkedIn Recruiter projects for new job openings:

  • Step 1: The Recruiter or Sourcer will create the project for a new job opening (be sure to coordinate with each other to avoid duplication of effort).

  • Step 2: The Recruiter or Sourcer will name the project so that project collaborators know exactly which role this project is for.

    • Standard naming convention: {TitleofRole} - {DateOfOpening} (MM/DD/YY) ({Recruiter’s Name})
      • Example 1: Senior Software Engineer - 2/16/22 (Kelsey)
      • Example 2: Product Manager - 1/24/22 (Devon)
  • Step 3: Under Project Settings > Project Details, the Recruiter or Sourcer will add relevant information gathered from the intake call, such as scope of work, ideal experience, etc. This is to create a point of reference for project collaborators.

  • Step 4: Project creator will need to make sure all relevant collaborators (Recruiter, Hiring Manager, Recruiting Operations Specialist/Sourcer, and relevant Director of Recruiting) are added to the project as project members with full project access.

  • Step 5: Recruiter, Sourcer, and Hiring Manager (optional depending on bandwidth) discuss a LinkedIn engagement strategy and draft 7 messages in accordance with the suggestions in Building a 7 Touch Recruiting Campaign. They should utulize the standard naming convention for all messages.

  • Step 6: Recruiter and Sourcer will start running high quality searches and add qualified candidates to the project.

  • Step 7: Starting on the day that the recruiter sends the first outreach to the candidates, they will set a recurring weekly calendar reminder to follow up with the candidates in that particular project. One week later, the recruiter will send the 2nd touchpoint. One week after that, they will send the 3rd, and so on until they’ve sent 7 touchpoints.

How to name your messaging templates in LinkedIn Recruiter

Using the suggestions in Building a 7 Touch Recruiting Campaign, the Recruiter and Sourcer should draft 7 messages for each role and develop an engagement strategy.

It is critical to continously test new templates, iterate, and improve messaging based on what is working and what isn’t. In order to capture this data, we make all templates viewable to “anyone at my organization” and use a standard naming convention so that we can compare how the following variables impact the candidate response rate for our messaging templates:

  1. The role we’re sourcing for
  2. The touch point (1-7)
  3. Whether or not we use a personal introduction. For example, “I saw that you also went to Duke. Go Bluedevils!”
  4. The subject line

The standard naming convention that Sourcegraph uses for LinkedIn Recruiter messaging templates is:

  • {Job Title} - Touch Point {X} - {with vs without} personal intro - {subject line}

    • Example 1: Payroll Manager - Touch Point 3 - without personal intro - {NAME}, quick question
    • Example 2: Enterprise Technical Advisor - Touch Point 5 - with personal intro - {NAME} + Sourcegraph = winning combo

How to make messaging templates viewable to “anyone at my organization”

We make all messaging templates viewable to “anyone at my organization” so that we can run a report and compare the response rate of our teams’ messaging templates all in one place. If you are creating a new messaging template from scratch, always make it visible to “Anyone in my organization”.

Please follow these steps to ensure any templates you’ve made in the past are viewable to anyone at the organization (and not private):

  1. Hover over your profile photo in the upper right hand corner
  2. Click “product settings”
  3. Click “messaging templates”
  4. On each of your templates, click the pensil icon
  5. At the bottom of your messaging template, under “Make this template visible to”, select the “Anyone in my organization” option.

How to use LinkedIn Recruiter as a Hiring Manager

  • Step 1: Once your license is activated, review the Hiring Manager’s Guide to Success with LinkedIn Recruiter for a quick introduction to the software workflow.
  • Step 2: Check to see that your recruiter has added you to your role’s hiring project and that you have full project access.
  • Step 3: Coordinate with your recruiter on an engagement strategy. The engagement strategy is an agreement on how you and the recruiter would like to collaborate and interact with candidates + each other within the LinkedIn project.

Sourcing and Outreach Best Practices

Our goal is to drive meaningful outreach and engagement with prospective candidates. When designing an engagement strategy, the goal is to create a sequence of messages and or/content at touch points delivered to a targeted candidate at predefined intervals.

Now that you have a project up and running it’s time to start sourcing and adding prospects to your project by running searches. When we run searches in LinkedIn Recruiter we prioritize:

  • Building strategic and targeted pipelines
    • Take time to understand what experience you are looking for and why
    • Take time reviewing a candidate’s profile to be able to send thoughtfully crafted inmails
    • Build pipelines with a specific role, reason, or goal in mind
    • Use pipelines to build long-term candidate relationships
  • Finding high potential candidates through representative talent searches
    • Ensure your search criteria has realistic requirements
    • Creatively update your search queries with unique identifiers to find talent that may be hidden from LinkedIn’s “Most Relevant” top search results page
    • Build talent pools that are representative of the global workforce

Step 1: Hiring Managers will work with their designated recruiter and sourcer to create realistic search criterias. This will be used to generate an automated pipeline of outbound candidates.

Step 2: Start running your search criteria on LinkedIn.

Step 3: Filter your search results

  • Filtering your search results will help further identify targeted profiles. Creatively plug and play these filters to thoroughly search through the candidate pool.

  • For Recruiters: Here is an indepth LinkedIn guide on how search filters work

  • Common filters used:

    • Job titles: Common industry titles the role has.
    • Keywords: Skills or phrases found on profiles of interest. The qualification section of job description is a good source for keywords.
    • Location: Any preference on location or time zone for the role.
    • Companies: Any companies that are known to have quality candidates for the role.
    • Years of experience: Possible minimum years of experience required for the role, or is commonly needed to gain the required qualifications.
  • Unique filter identifiers:

    • Keywords: Organizations and groups that candidates are currently or were previously involved with (alumni groups, non-profits, open-source communities, etc)
    • Location: Locations that are often overlooked in favor of typical tech hubs
    • Network Relationships: Maximize the network you’ve already built
    • Recruiting activity: Revisit qualified candidates from 3+ months ago
    • Spotlights: Review candidates that are more likely to respond or already engaged with our talent brand
  • Step 4: Save searches and set up search alerts

Engagement strategy

The engagement strategy is an agreement between the hiring manager and recruiter regarding how they will collaborate and interact with each other and candidates through LinkedIn Recruiter to effectively reach out to prospective profiles. When designing an engagement strategy, the goal is to create a sequence of messages and or/content at touch points delivered to a targeted candidate at predefined intervals.

The Hiring Manager and Recruiter will generally work together on setting up the search criteria based on the required qualifications and spend some time reviewing an initial set of profiles together so that they are aligned on what the ideal profiles are for the role.

As LinkedIn begins to surface batches of candidates that meet this criteria, Recruiter and Hiring manager will decide how to share and review profiles together going forward.

Outreach Best Practices

How to create a Recruiting Outreach Campaign

The Hiring Manager and Recruiter will determine their outreach strategy regarding how to engage with ideal profiles. Typically the recruiter will do the initial outreach via inmail or email and then set up an intro call. At times it may be appropriate for the recruiter to request the hiring manager to message potential profiles.

Only candidates we decide to engage will be added into Greenhouse.