With 2017 drawing to a close, we wanted to highlight LinkedIn’s top 10 product updates from this year—from search filters that help you find open candidates, to a brand new way to connect LinkedIn Recruiter to your ATS.
Check out the list below to make sure you’re taking advantage of all these new features designed to help you hear back quickly from candidates, work more efficiently with your ATS and create a delightful candidate journey.
Hear back from candidates faster
1. New Spotlights identify candidates open to new opportunities and more likely to respond
You spend a lot of your time sourcing the best candidates, reaching out, and hoping they get back to you. Now it’s easier to find the right people: LinkedIn Recruiter search got a lot more powerful this year with the introduction of Spotlights—smart search filters that identify talent most likely to respond to your outreach.
The Open to New Opportunities Spotlight helps you discover candidates who are open to hearing from recruiters, so you can prioritize them in your sourcing efforts. LinkedIn research shows that 90% of professionals are open to new opportunities if presented with the right role, making this feature incredibly powerful for your day-to-day outreach.
The Past Applicant Spotlight surfaces talent that started to apply, but may not have finished their application. Past applicants are highly responsive to recruiters and 4x more likely to respond to your InMail. And if you really want to zero in on all the candidates most likely to reply to your team, there’s a Likely to Respond Spotlight for that, too.
The data doesn’t lie: recruiters that use Spotlights see 64% higher InMail response rates.
2. Apply Starters doubles your active talent pool by surfacing candidates that did not complete their job application
The best, most in-demand talent often abandons applications before finishing—after all, they’ve got recruiters chasing after them. Now you can still find out who started an application, whether or not they finished.
The Apply Starter feature lets candidates share their LinkedIn profile with you before they begin, allowing you to find them (via the Past Applicants Spotlight) and reach out. This roughly doubles your talent pool for a given job and gives you a strong pipeline of candidates for future roles.
3. Contractor Targeting lets you hone in on talent open to contracting roles
It’s frustrating to identify the perfect candidate for your contract position, only to find out they’re only interested in full-time roles. LinkedIn Recruiter’s new Contractor Targeting feature lets you filter your searches for talent most open to contracting roles—a pool of 6.2 million professionals.
The tool gives candidates the option to explicitly say they’re open to contracting, but our advanced algorithm also analyzes profiles to surface likely contractors. Candidates you contact via this feature are 2x more likely to respond—and 40% of contractors that are open to new opportunities respond within 24 hours.
All these search filters make it much easier to pinpoint the kind of candidate you’re looking to engage—and those most likely to engage back.
Improve your ATS workflow efficiency
4. Recruiter System Connect integrates LinkedIn Recruiter with your ATS to streamline your workflow
You like LinkedIn Recruiter and you like your applicant tracking system (ATS), but toggling back and forth all day can be painful. The two platforms haven’t spoken the same language—until now.
You’ve been long requesting the ability to integrate LinkedIn Recruiter with your ATS—so we partnered with major ATS providers to make it happen.
Recruiter System Connect lets you sync between the two for consistent, up-to-date candidate info. Now you can see your ATS data in Recruiter, so you can stop copy-and-pasting between platforms.
Leverage data to optimize your performance
5. InMail Analytics makes it easy to visualize your team’s performance and share best practices
You obviously want to improve your InMail performance, but that’s difficult to do without a clear picture of your performance in the first place.
InMail Analytics let you clearly see who’s responding, how your templates are doing, and how your performance stacks up to industry benchmarks.
The tool also lets managers compare team members’ InMail response rates, allowing you to see who’s doing best, find out what they’re doing right, and share those best practices across your whole organization.
6. The Performance Summary Report shows you how to make the most of all your LinkedIn products
If you’ve ever wanted to see how well you’re doing across your whole suite of LinkedIn products, look no further than the Performance Summary Report.
You’ll see performance metrics on your Job Slots, InMails, and hires influenced by LinkedIn—along with tips and suggestions to help you make the most of them.
Additionally, the new report also lets you see insights on your Talent Flows—proprietary LinkedIn info on what companies you’re losing talent to and which ones you’re gaining talent from.
Create a delightful candidate journey
7. The new Jobs tab on LinkedIn’s mobile app doubled the number of members viewing jobs per week
In order for candidates to find your jobs on LinkedIn, they need an intuitive, easy-to-use user experience. That’s exactly why we added a standalone Jobs tab on our mobile app this year.
The new tab puts LinkedIn jobs front-and-center and offers users rich, personalized recommendations. The result: 22 million LinkedIn members now check out jobs on our platform every week—a 2x increase since 2015. It’s all part of offering candidates a smoother, streamlined journey.
8. Pipeline Builder offers a new way to target candidates at scale for high-volume hiring
You can find super niche candidates, you can make a ton of hires, and you can hire people quickly—but doing all three at once is a huge challenge. It’s also a pretty common challenge.
That’s why we created Pipeline Builder: a new media product to help you generate a list of targeted talent quickly and at scale. It lets you identify a super-specific talent pool, engage them with Recruitment Ads and Sponsored Updates, and direct them to a personalized landing page for your position.
Once there, all candidates need to do is click the “I’m Interested” button and they’ll be added to your pipeline via integration with LinkedIn Recruiter. See how it works here.
9. Next-Gen LinkedIn Career Pages showcases your talent brand with new media-rich pages
Career Pages made a major leap in late 2016. The redesigned Career Page features a new Life page to show off your company culture, offers candidates a dedicated Jobs page, lets you target talent pools with ads, and gives you real-time analytics on critical KPIs.
2017 saw further upgrades to LinkedIn Careers Pages with updated analytics that help you measure success at all stages of your recruitment pipeline. These in-product analytics help you measure the traffic and demographics of your page visitors, impact on job engagement and pipeline, and gain competitive insight, including who you are gaining talent from and losing talent to.
It’s never been easier to show candidates what you’re all about and see how they’re engaging with your employer brand.
10. The Apply with LinkedIn plugin makes it easy for candidates to apply with their LinkedIn profile
Some candidates will apply to your positions on LinkedIn itself, but many will also apply from your company’s career page.
While manually filling in forms can make for a time-consuming candidate experience, the new Apply with LinkedIn plugin dramatically streamlines the process.
Not only will it auto-fill parts of their application—improving completion rates—the plugin also lets you find these candidates in Recruiter, even if they don’t complete the application.
Whew! That’s just a taste of the new features we served up for you in 2017—here’s to another year of exciting updates that will make your life easier in 2018!
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*Image Andrew Neel on Unsplash
Topics: LinkedIn product tips
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