LinkedIn has announced the upgrade of their Recruiter platform, the first since 2013. Recruiter is LinkedIn’s flagship premium recruiting product used by over 40,000 subscribers. The new version is now being offered as an upgrade on a rolling basis to the global user base.

LinkedIn Upgrades Recruiter

While Recruiter is the “top of the line” recruiting solution, LinkedIn also provides several other free and paid services to support recruiting activities. For example, the LinkedIn Company page and accompanying Career page are valuable assets to deploy to establish an Employer Talent Brand and to post specific jobs. The Company page is free while the Career page is a premium “add-on” feature. Don’t forget that Company page activity and presence connects back to individual employee profiles.

Savvy companies are enlisting their employees as brand ambassadors to help them attract top passive talent and buyers. Employee personal profiles help carry the brand message, but only if companies are effectively training hiring managers, recruiters, and other departmental staff. The profiles work in concert with the Company and Career pages to support the brand for recruiting and sales.

Once the foundation is laid with employer and employee branding, many organizations are ready for more a powerful recruiting solution such as LinkedIn Recruiter. The new Recruiter platform now includes these capabilities:

The “Intuitive Search Bar” guides and prompts you

The new LinkedIn Recruiter search bar makes your searching much easier.

Enter the job title you are searching for and LinkedIn will now prompt the user for city and skills. This intuitive program is helpful because Recruiter suggests the “trending skills” for the job title. This is particularly helpful for new candidate searches. (LinkedIn illustration below)

“Smart Suggest” uncovers new talent

Do the most active hiring managers know exactly who they are looking for? It is likely they will use this description: “I want someone exactly like Sue Jones or Matt Smith” for this new role. LinkedIn has the answer with their new smart suggest feature on Recruiter. In addition to the one-time search, recruiters can use the smart suggest feature to help create a passive talent pool for their most commonly recruited positions. 

How does this work? Enter the name of the star employees and top performers into the Recruiter platform. The new candidate list will include people who share similar profile characteristics with your movers and shakers.

“Spotlights”prioritize warmer candidates

LinkedIn Recruiter allows users to filter results of candidates that are more likely to engage. Millennials especially want to work near and along with their personal network, so the Spotlights feature easily prioritizes them for recruiters.

Spotlights will highlight the candidates who are following your company page, have previously applied to work at your company and are first degree connections with one or more of your employees. According to LinkedIn, these specific indicators show that a candidate is 2 times more likely to respond to your InMail message. The spotlight prospects are warmer than an average candidate.

In addition to the new features, users can still count on LinkedIn Recruiter for the ability to:

• View and Contact anyone on LinkedIn. The Recruiter platform allows the user to view full profile details and reach out via LinkedIn messaging system – InMail. Recruiter provides custom templates for easier InMail messaging.
• Manage and Save Candidate Searches and Projects. Users can tag, sort and comment on candidates within the platform. The shared project folders also help a recruiting team to save time.
• Premium Search Filters – This feature allows you to narrow down your search very specifically by over 20 categories.

The premium capabilities offered by LinkedIn Talent Solutions are among the best tools for Talent Professionals who need to actively recruit beyond their immediate personal or company network. Some companies choose to use all of the services from Talent Solutions, but smaller organizations usually have to evaluate and select which combination of solutions will best serve their needs. Are you using these new Recruiter features yet? Which one is your favorite?