How to effectively recruit employees using LinkedIn Ads?

What are campaigns with a goal of job candidates on LinkedIn?

Candidate campaigns are one of the paid campaign types in LinkedIn Ads, where you can increase the reach of your job offers to a targeted audience. In this type of campaign, your goal will be to attract more submissions to your job listing(s). The campaign itself is optimized by LinkedIn to reach people who are most likely to view or click on this type of ad. So you can expect that people who are actively looking for jobs, interacting with other job listings, will be the first choice for the LinkedIn Ads algorithm in this type of campaign.

Is it worth running a campaign under candidates in LinkedIn Ads?

Decidedly! It’s one of the more effective ways to recruit effectively outside of recruitment portals.

What are the advantages of this type of LinkedIn Ads campaign?

1. You will increase the number of applications

The LinkedIn recruitment solutions will help you attract new applications. At the same time, you will get access to people with precisely defined requirements. Whether you are looking for people with a specific position or qualities, you can specify these requirements in the ad. In addition, you will have the opportunity to add custom questions that will allow you to pre-verify the skills or profile of candidates.

2. You will attract the attention of passive candidates

This reason is one of the most important reasons why you should run LinkedIn ads with a Candidates target. They will allow you to reach people who are not actively looking for a job, but at the same time are willing to consider a change if there is a matching offer that matches their expectations. So with LinkedIn ads, you can reach these highly qualified candidates and encourage them to consider a change, while not competing as an employer with multiple offers.

3. You will increase brand awareness

Job postings on LinkedIn allow you to increase brand awareness among the candidates you seek. If someone hasn’t heard of your company before, by advertising a job offer to them, they will become familiar with your company. This action won’t translate directly into applications, but it can help promote your brand as an active, growing company. 

4. You will reduce the time it takes to close a recruitment

The recruitment process can take weeks or months if you are not reaching out to candidates or those you are reaching out to are not qualified. Instead of waiting for the right candidate to come along, you can run LinkedIn ads and get applications faster.

How to create a LinkedIn Ads recruitment campaign?

Constructing the campaign itself starts with selecting a goal, and according to LinkedIn, that goal for Candidates is conversions. In the next step you should configure the audience, where you have a choice of:

• location
• language
• custom data like: uploaded lists, remarketing, like users, etc.
• attributes like: industries or categories of the company they work for, gender, education, work experience or interests
• exclusions (LinkedIn Ads will automatically exclude active employees of your company from the campaign)

When configuring your LinkedIn Ads audience group, you will see a performance forecast on the right side. It changes according to the changes you make Thanks to this data, you will find out the projected size of the group, the estimated budget for 1,7 or 30 days, as well as displays or clicks. You can also break down the added group into segments by job title, experience, industry and other parameters.

In the campaign, you need to set up a schedule and budget. You can use a daily budget or a total budget. The minimum daily budget is $10 or the equivalent in another currency. For the rate strategy, you will have a choice of optimizing for clicks or impressions. I strongly recommend the former option and only these models are used with us at digital agency In LinkedIn Ads, you can manage your rates manually by setting a limit, or let the algorithm get the „best possible results” automatically. Here again, it’s better to set the rates manually and start smaller, then verify that you are getting the expected number of impressions or clicks.

If you opt for an ad format that directs outward to a landing page, you can additionally set up conversion tracking. When creating a campaign, select the conversion signal you created earlier so that it is properly assigned to the campaign.

There is no need to select a conversion signal.

Recruitment ad formats in LinkedIn Ads

In LinkedIn Ads recruitment campaigns you will have four formats to choose from:

• single job listing
• collective sub-page with offers of a particular company
• advertisement with redirection to www and single photo
• spotlight personalized ad

The most effective format will be the former, as it is easier to target, is branded with a link to the brand’s profile, and has an automatic CTA in the form of the text „View Job Listing.” To run it, of course, you’ll need to set up a job listing from the brand’s profile on LinkedIn beforehand.

The second format does not directly communicate an individual job offer, but promotes the brand and directs automatically to a sub-page with all job offers. In case you are looking for people for many different positions at the same time, it will be difficult to get good targeting. This version of the ad only appears on mobile devices and includes your profile picture in combination with the brand logo. You have several standard calls to action like „see more jobs,” or you can use custom text and use macros. Macros are variables that will allow you to replace given text in your ad with your company name, first name, etc.

Single-image advertising is the only one that allows you to display ads on LinkedIn’s audience network, i.e. third-party publishers. This is the simplest form of advertising directing to an external site. It will certainly be useful if you use an external recruitment system or want to redirect users to your site.

Spotlight advertising in LinkedIn Ads is a personalized form of advertising that includes your profile picture and brand logo. You can add a headline and ad content to these elements. In this version, you direct the user when they click to an external landing page. Regardless of which format you ultimately choose, you will increase your chances of successful recruitment!