7 LinkedIn Tools for Recruiting New Employees Use these seven tools from LinkedIn to track down the best job candidates for your business.

The following excerpt is from Ted Prodromou's book Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Apple Books | IndieBound

LinkedIn offers a number of paid solutions for companies who do a lot of recruiting. Let's explore these options in more detail, so you can see how they can help you build a premier organization with the very best employees.

1. LinkedIn Recruiter.

This premium subscription is designed for large companies that are constantly searching for the best talent. Some of the benefits of the LinkedIn Recruiter Corporate Edition subscription include:

• Unlimited access to names and full profiles of potential candidates. When you search for talent using your free LinkedIn account, you won't see the full profile of many members, and the number of search results is limited. With this subscription, you'll see the complete profile of every LinkedIn member and up to 1,000 search results.

• Advanced Search Features that aren't included in the free version of Advanced Search. With the LinkedIn Recruiter Corporate Edition subscription, you can filter your searches by Industry, Company Size, Education, Company, Years in Position, and Years of Experience. This lets you find the ideal candidates for your open positions.

• Contact candidates directly using InMail. You receive 50 InMails per month per seat to contact any candidate you like on LinkedIn. InMails have proven to have very high response rates so being able to contact up to 50 prospective candidates per month is a tremendous boost to your recruiting efforts.

• Up to 50 search alerts per day when targeting candidates for an open position. This means you can queue up searches for specific jobs and you'll be automatically alerted when a prospective candidate is found. You can quickly reach out to this candidate before your competition, giving you a huge advantage. You can also send one-to-many InMails using saved InMail templates, enabling you to contact more candidates faster.

2. The Jobs Network.

By using the LinkedIn Job Board, you can expand your search for candidates to passive candidates using the Jobs You May Be Interested In widget. Letting LinkedIn members see what other opportunities are out there in a subtle manner catches their eye so they explore the new opportunities.

Companies that post jobs in the LinkedIn Jobs Network also have the ability to measure the impact of their job postings through LinkedIn's job analytics, which helps you understand exactly which types of candidates your jobs are reaching and lets you see who's viewing your jobs by role, company, geography, and more to ensure you're reaching the best professionals.

3. LinkedIn Career Pages.

In addition to the sidebar widget, your job postings will also appear on the LinkedIn Career Pages. You can purchase a recruiting program called the LinkedIn Job Slot, which allows you to do all of the following:

• Change your job posting as often as you like—even daily, if necessary.
• Easily renew and keep a position open on LinkedIn for longer than 30 days.
• Receive up to 50 real-time candidate recommendations per post.
• Streamline the job posting process with integrated third-party job distributors so your job listing gets maximum exposure on the internet.
• Pull job postings from your website into LinkedIn automatically through job wrapping, which is an additional cost. Job wrapping is a proprietary technology created by LinkedIn that automatically keeps your job postings in sync on your website and LinkedIn.
• Send applicants straight to your Applicant Tracking System from LinkedIn.
• Add a third-party tracking URL to your job posting so you can track results with your own analytics system. This allows you to easily track the success of your recruiting campaigns.

4. Jobs for You Web Ads.

This LinkedIn service automatically pushes your jobs to the most qualified candidates, wherever they go online. This lets you distribute your jobs to thousands of websites across the internet, automatically. This is a very effective way to reach passive candidates who aren't actively searching for a new position but are open to the possibilities of changing jobs. LinkedIn uses a combination of your targeting criteria and data from a person's LinkedIn profile to display your ads to the most qualified candidates.

5. Company Pages.

Every organization needs a company page on LinkedIn where you can post company update messages, provide information about your products and services, post job openings, and view detailed analytics information about the people who have visited your company page.

Another important feature of company pages is the ability for people to "follow" your company. When someone follows your company, LinkedIn keeps them up to date on your company's job opportunities, personnel changes, and new product or services posted on your company page by automatically sending your company updates to his LinkedIn homepage.

Subscribing to the Silver or Gold Level Career Page subscription provides many enhancements to your company page that will improve your recruiting experience and build a loyal following for your company. As potential candidates explore your company page to learn more about your company, they'll see your current job openings on the same screen. You also have the ability to display customized content for each visitor, based on his or her LinkedIn profile data.

You also have the ability to set up ads that run on LinkedIn to drive people to your company page to learn more about your jobs or products and services. You can also prevent ads from other companies from appearing on your company page if you choose the Gold Career Page package.

6. Work With Us.

This is not only one of the simplest LinkedIn recruiting and advertising solutions, it's also one of the most effective. How do you feel when you are looking at the LinkedIn profile of one of your colleagues and you see a huge ad from one of your competitors in the sidebar? Doesn't it drive you crazy when you see your competitors invading your company's space?

In the past no one had any control over this, but now we do. The LinkedIn Work with Us ads let you display your advertising on your employees' profile pages and your company pages. To run Work with Us ads, just contact LinkedIn, provide them your creative material, and they will automatically place your ads on all of your employee profile pages and your company pages. If you are going to run only one marketing campaign on LinkedIn, this is the one you need to do to protect your brand.

7. Recruitment Ads.

These are the large career banner ads you see in the sidebar of your LinkedIn homepage and on other pages throughout the LinkedIn website. Placing your career opportunities in front of LinkedIn members helps attract members actively pursuing new career opportunities as well as those not actively looking but open to new opportunities.

LinkedIn Recruitment Ads use the same proprietary ad-targeting algorithm as other LinkedIn advertising options. This ensures your ads are shown only to the appropriate potential candidates. This ability to target your ads with precision gives you a competitive advantage when you are recruiting new employees.