Is LinkedIn Recruiter the Most Valuable Primary Recruitment Tool?

Krissy Manzano: Hi, and welcome to the Blueprint Round Table. We have another great episode today. I’m Krissy Manzano, I’ll be your host, and then I have Lizzy Castro with me and Emily Bell, who will fiercely be debating or agreeing about the topic around LinkedIn as a primary recruiting tool. Is LinkedIn the most valuable platform for sourcing and connecting with potential candidates?

Lizzy, I’ll pass it over to you to take the first step at this.

Lizzy Castro: So in my experience I’ve worked with LinkedIn recruiter, HireEasy and Gem. Those are three, I would say the most used sourcing tools. And in my personal opinion, I think LinkedIn recruiter is the best option. For me when I’m sourcing it’s, I think it’s very important to have everything in one system.

Yes, it’s great to have maybe that other one that does more email sequences, but the number one thing for me is I love how like, did one keep everything sorted in the projects. You know which candidates are in what projects. So it already highlights that for you, so you’re not multiple reaching out to people multiple times for separate roles.

I think it’s great how you can also share those projects with other people who are on your recruiting team and sourcing team. I think that gives a lot of visibility. Also too, with experience, LinkedIn recruiter, when you’re sending out those InMails, they’re going to the top of someone’s LinkedIn inmail box versus going to an InMail box or in your email that maybe is going to spam or they’re not able to locate it.

So personal experience, I think LinkedIn recruiter is the top-notch. People are checking LinkedIn, I think way more than they’re checking their personal emails when it comes to job hunting and looking for new positions. But Emily interested in your thoughts.

Emily Bell: Yeah, I would say. I would agree with you on that. I think LinkedIn is the gold standard as far as professional networks, as far as professionally, where people are gonna check in for messaging, updates, industry knowledge and personal email is getting everything from, like you have a doctor’s appointment coming up to here’s your kids, like elementary, like 2023, 2024, schedule to baseball, like, you know, everything is coming through that so you clear out naturally a lot of noise going via LinkedIn. I think it’s really important though to stay diversified in tools, especially because they are totally aligned to ROI. Most of the time, if you can get like two hires a year, it justifies the cost of a lot of these platforms.

So, why not have multiple fishing lines out? But I would agree with you. I think that from a response rate standpoint, from a touch, like a cadence and just an overall visibility standpoint, LinkedIn’s gonna be consistently one of the top platforms and to engage talent in particular, passive talent.

And I think that just like in sales, when you’re doing outbound, you do have to have, you know, a couple of different tools in your arsenal for outbound. ‘Cause you never quite know, even if 80% of your candidates come from one path, that other 20% still is needed in order to get you to your company’s revenue targets.

So it needs to be diversified, but I think that, you know, for folks that are looking, if you had to choose one my short answer would be LinkedIn recruiter seems to have, you know, just really consistent response rates across all types of roles. Whereas you have, you know, various different solutions that maybe might be better for like SDR type candidates or you know, AE candidates.

So all that to say, keep your options open. But if you had to pick one LinkedIn recruiter, I don’t think you can really go wrong with it. Krissy, what do you think?

Krissy Manzano: I mean, yeah I think LinkedIn recruiter is a great tool. Now granted, if you’re not on LinkedIn, like if you’re recruiting truck drivers as an example, that’s not gonna be the tool that you use, right? So it depends if you’re recruiting nurses, right? You’re in healthcare, it’s probably not the platform that you’re using.

So I think it depends on the audience. Like the audience that we are recruiting for is always on LinkedIn normally, right? Like I don’t think we’ve ever run into. Now granted for SDRs that’s a little bit different because if they’re not, if it’s their first job out of college they may not even be on LinkedIn yet, or just getting on LinkedIn.

Right. So I think it depends on the industry, but I think from the tech side and B2B side LinkedIn it works really well because it kind of has the monopoly on the professional, like white collar, you know, candidate database, right? That’s if you are in a job like that is where you were listed, right?

That’s you have a profile, even if you’re not active on it. There’s not really anything else out there that people use consistently. For that it’s the most well known. To your point, I do think it’s beneficial to diversify your platforms because again, like why it’s very easy if you are, even like not that bad at recruiting to have the ROI pay off for this.

Right? And so why not find multiple ways? ‘Cause they don’t all do the same things, right? Like, the way that other tools can sequence and, you know, reach out is a little bit different than LinkedIn recruiter, right? Even though LinkedIn recruiter is probably, you know, in some cases, like, you know, they’re gonna get that message if they’re on LinkedIn.

You’re removing the noise from all the other things they get from their personal email. But it’s different. These platforms all have their advantages, right, of like, What another platform doesn’t do really well or something of that nature. So if you can kind of close those gaps by using one or two platforms, even if you’re a really small business what, you know, I think that’s important so you’re not held hostage to just one. Especially since you know, you normally are limited on credits, right? And so you don’t wanna, I think that’s the biggest thing. Anytime you have credits you wanna make sure that you’re not just reliant on those to feed your mouths. Right. And to be successful.

But that’s kind of my overall take. I think it’s a great tool and you know, it’s expensive, but it’s a great tool to use and, you know, the ROI does pay for itself. The only thing I would ask is, what do you all think is, would if someone had to pick two. What were the, what are the two that you would recommend?

Lizzy Castro: I don’t think I would pick two. I just think, and I don’t mean to be negative in any way. ‘Cause Yes, I do think it’s great having two systems. I, we have HireEasy, and I do think it, it helps a lot because they have more of a feature to find diverse talent.

Krissy Manzano: Yep.

Emily Bell: Mm.

Lizzy Castro: I think. LinkedIn overall, and I, again, I just have a lot of, I’ve had a lot of success with it.

I think it’s easier to get people’s attention. It’s easier to get those response rates. Yes. The credit aspect that you caught out is a hundred percent accurate. Like you need to stay on top of those. If you don’t have another platform, you for sure are gonna need another one. But yeah I would put all my eggs in one basket for LinkedIn, but I have used Gem.

I have used Gem and Hire Easy. And comparing those two, I would go with Hire Easy over Gem. Because I like how hire Easy integrates more with LinkedIn, it’s not too many clicks. If you need to import someone into the system, it’s very easy to do it. Where in my experience with the other one, it was just taking up a little bit more time.

Emily Bell: That’s a good point. I would add to that. It’s tough to pick just two because it would depend on your industry. It would depend on a multitude of factors.

But my advice would be regardless of industry, understand really well when you’re assessing platforms, what they integrate with, and kind of go through some testing around like what.

The motion would look like to go and work within those interfaces on a day-to-day basis. ’cause when you think about sourcing, you’re reaching out to hundreds of candidates. And then when you think about, you know, response rates, that could be anywhere from, you know, 50 to 70 that respond and are in a some type of interview cycle throughout a 30 day period.

So it’s a lot to keep track of. And so having systems that you can seamlessly jump in and out within, and that have some sort of integration for upload and note taking or merging, that is massive. And then the other piece would be, the make sure that the platform has the ability to search by profile indicators that matter to what you’re gonna be looking for.

And they, they all have different strengths. And so that’s one of the reasons why we went with HireEasy. We actually didn’t look at LinkedIn recruiter like in depth. We were, it was one of, it was one high level, but HireEasy was a really great option for us because of the ability to go in and see very specific data points and variables that would be customizable across multiple types of searches.

Lizzy Castro: I think there’s, yeah, I mean, you could argue both are great tools, especially too, I think a tool like Hire Easy is gonna be great for those senior leadership roles. If you’re looking for a second line manager, director, VP of sales, even maybe a C-level executive, you’re definitely [00:10:00] gonna have some more success with Hire Easy with that email sequence versus LinkedIn recruiter where you’ll see more IC, more junior, sometimes a little bit more senior level leaders. So yeah, there’s room for both, but again, I choose LinkedIn recruiter,

Krissy Manzano: Well look, I think these are all points. Lizzy is never going to say anything other than LinkedIn recruiter because she.

Emily Bell: I love that. Girl knows what she likes.

Krissy Manzano: I know that’s, she’s like, I’ve had success there. Like, that’s my favorite. But what I will say is, you know, for anyone listening to this, we’ve used LinkedIn recruiter we have people who’ve used Gem, Hire Easy, Recruit Bot.

They’re all fantastic sourcing tools. They all have pros that the others don’t. And so, you know, to Emily’s point, it’s really trying to figure out like what you need. These are great, you know, for B2B. Some might even have some B2C and you know, it really depends on your industry, but you know what you need and putting that plan together.

And so whether you are recruiting agency, internal TA or a company that has none of those things, if you don’t have any of those things like internal TA you should hire a recruiting agency because it’s probably not worth your time to invest in these tools if. ’cause it’s a full-time job of going through that.

But, you know, definitely take a look at those tools because they’re all great. And then, you know, comment below if there’s anything that you’ve used that is fantastic that we didn’t give a shout out to ’cause we haven’t used it that you think our followers should know about. But thanks for the conversation you all.

This was great. Until next time, we’ll see you later. Bye.