8 Tips on How to Get More out of LinkedIn Recruiter from 2 Superusers

There’s a lot of buzz right now about a new generation of tools, driven by AI or generative AI, that will make life better for everyone. Including recruiters. 

But we want to remind recruiters that there are already some great tools, also driven by AI, that can help them do their jobs faster and more efficiently, giving them time back to focus on more strategic work. As long-time superusers of LinkedIn Recruiter and as its chief evangelists, we want to make sure that talent acquisition pros are leveraging the most powerful new features on Recruiter as well as some of its most helpful long-time features.

We’ve both been at LinkedIn for a dozen years and our goal has always been to help recruiters find and hire the right candidates — faster, easier, more consistently. So, here are eight tips on how you can leverage your LinkedIn Recruiter seat and become a superuser too:

1. Tap into the Recommended Matches feature, which gets better and better over the course of a project

Recommended Matches is your indispensable sourcing partner that gets better every day. 

The feature uses AI to help you find candidates you haven’t yet identified. Recommended Matches is powered by your real-time hiring activity — which candidates you’ve saved, messaged, or hidden — as well as job posting signals, such as job titles, skills, and locations, and the job-seeking actions of LinkedIn members, such as Open to work. 

Recommended Matches saves you time, improves your efficiency, and — most importantly — expands your talent pool, even as you focus on other high-value tasks. With Recommended Matches, you’ll discover up to 10% new and qualified candidates on top of your Recruiter search results. And candidates found with this tool are up to 35% more likely to accept your InMails. 

Recommended Matches is working in the background, sending you new candidates based on your real-time hiring activities. Those candidates will be grouped into categories across the top of your page, and each category provides insight as to why the person is being recommended. So, they may have signaled they’re open to work, they may have connections at your company, or they may have engaged with your talent brand by, say, following your company or engaging with content you’ve posted. Recommended Matches does all the heavy lifting for you.

2. Craft personalized outreach message in seconds using AI-Assisted Messages

Personalization works. And we’ve got the numbers to back it up: When recruiters personalize InMail messages, they can see an overall 40% increase in their acceptance rate. But personalization takes time and effort. Until now.

With AI-Assisted Messages, a generative AI feature that began rolling out this year (and is currently only available in English), you can create fully customized outreach messages in seconds, helping you save time, boost engagement, and personalize at scale.

AI-Assisted Messages draws on information in the candidate’s profile, the recruiter’s profile and company, and the job description to draft a targeted message. Once you have that, you can fine-tune your message by customizing the fields — such as skills, location, compensation, or workplace type — used by the AI model. And, of course, you can also edit content directly if you choose and then send your message.

Some 74% of hiring professionals hope that integrating generative AI into recruiting will help automate repetitive tasks so they can prioritize strategic work. Well, consider it done.

3. Sort large applicant pools quickly with Applicant Spotlights 

Of course, you’re looking for lots and lots of applicants for your open role. But now that you have them, how do you get through them all?

Starting in December 2023, you will be able to use Applicant Spotlights within Jobs management to cluster applicants into smaller groups based on desirable signals, such as their being open to work, having connections to people in your company, being an internal candidate, or being active talent, which means having updated their profile or shared their resume on LinkedIn. You will be able to apply one specific filter to your applicant pool or several Spotlight filters at once. 

Either way, Applicant Spotlights will save you time and effort by prioritizing applicants who are more likely to engage with you and your organization.

4. Use Apply Starters to reach qualified candidates who’ve expressed interest but not yet finished an application

There are many reasons why a talented candidate may start to apply for an open position but then abandon the application midstream. They may get distracted by another task, start interacting with another recruiter, or even experience a technological glitch. 

But that doesn’t mean they’re not interested in pursuing opportunities in your organization. In fact, candidates who abandon applications are four times more likely to respond if you initiate a conversation.

With the Apply Starters feature, candidates can opt to share their LinkedIn profile when they click on the “Apply on company website” or “Apply with LinkedIn” buttons. That lets you identify candidates who did not complete the application process, see their interest and qualifications, and reach out if you gauge they are potentially a good fit.

5. Save hours and build stronger candidate relationships with Automated Follow-Ups

Building a relationship with the most desirable candidates can take time, and you’re probably not the only recruiter vying for their attention. That means it’s critical to keep the lines of communication open and the conversation flowing so you stay top of mind.

A follow-up can make a candidate feel valued and be the factor that leads them to accept your message rather than somebody else’s. The Automated Follow-Ups feature does the legwork for you, letting you schedule and automate messages and follow-ups to candidates, freeing you to focus on other tasks.

The feature also helps you ensure that your follow-ups are sent at optimal times, between three and 28 days later, and at the candidate’s time zone to ensure you’re reaching the right candidates at the right time.

The Automated Follow-Ups feature also prevents you from unintentionally spamming candidates: It only lets you follow-up once and a scheduled follow-up won’t go out if the candidate has already responded. 

The content of your messages will likely vary depending on the candidates you’re following or the roles you’re trying to fill, so you can craft your messages from scratch or customize existing templates to guide the follow-up conversation.

6. With Search Spotlights, identify candidates really motivated to find a new role 

Some actions suggest that a candidate falls under the category of “Active Talent.” Translation: They’re particularly interested in job opportunities at this time. 

• They may have recently beefed up their profile.
• They may have agreed to let LinkedIn share their resume with recruiters. 
• They work at companies that have had recent layoffs. 

By zeroing in on these candidates using the Search Spotlights feature when you’re sourcing on Recruiter, you can focus on talent that is more likely to respond, potentially cutting down on the overall time you’ll need to fill an important role. (This feature is similar to the Applicant Spotlights discussed above but it focuses on sourcing candidates rather than filtering applicants.)

Since every company’s needs are different, you can also search for candidates using other criteria, such as candidate interests, whether they have first-degree connections with your current employees, or the length of time they’ve been with their current job.

The Search Spotlights feature doesn’t just help you identify external candidates; you can also apply search criteria to internal candidates who have been in their roles for a minimum of six months and may be prime for a different role. 

Search Spotlights also lets you identify Rediscovered Candidates — those who your organization has already interacted with in the past. Reaching out to those candidates could be particularly fruitful since they already know something about the organization, and their familiarity may make them give extra consideration to a potential role.

7. Move critical tasks forward quickly with Suggested Actions

Whether you’re following up with candidates, renewing expiring job posts, or responding to pressing messages, there's always something for a recruiter to do. Instead of losing valuable time and firing up your brain cells trying to figure out which task to jump on next, the Suggested Actions feature prompts you with suggestions based on your previous activity and project updates. 

It’s all too easy to miss a deadline or fall behind on a project because of one delayed task. By accessing Suggested Actions on the Recruiter homepage, you can use your time more efficiently, increase your overall productivity, and easily move your sourcing forward.

While you don’t have to act on a Suggested Action, the feature makes it easy if you choose to do so. Simply tap the card where the action appears to take the recommended step forward.

8. Coming soon: Automated search alerts that eliminate manual and repetitive work

We have taken our show on the road nearly a dozen times over the years and, whether the economy is up or down and whether hiring is slow or sizzling hot, we have always touted Saved Searches for its uncanny ability to save you time and energy. 

Maybe we should call it Saved Recruiters — because that’s what it has done. But we aren’t stopping there.

Soon, recruiters will no longer need to manually enable saved search alerts to stay on top of relevant new search results. Recruiter will notify you of new candidate profiles that match your search criteria, all based on the projects you are engaging with the most.

Work cooling down on an existing project? No problem. When Recruiter notices that you’re not active in a project anymore, it will automatically stop sending you updates for that project and pivot to updates on more relevant ones.

With automated search results, Recruiter will continue to pump candidates to you for the roles you’re filling frequently and notify you via push notifications and email, now without the manual work of saving and setting search alerts.

And if that isn’t great, we don’t know what is. 

Final thoughts

There is so much you can do with your Recruiter seat and — we get it — sometimes it’s a lot to keep track of. That’s why we hope you’ll try out the features suggested above and see how quickly you’re finding and hiring the right candidates with less effort.

To stay up-to-date on getting the most from Recruiter, click here for our most recent product updates.