5 workarounds to a startup’s hiring challenges on LinkedIn

Are you a founder, a manager or a recruiter? Are you involved in hiring at your organization? There is a high chance you are using LinkedIn for hiring but not to its best.

LinkedIn is not the only platform but the first you turn to whenever you set out to hire. LinkedIn has the largest database of professionals in the world with more than 400 million users, yet if you are using LinkedIn for hiring you are missing out on a lot of amazing talent and of course your time. That is a serious issue and a threat to the success of your business. Something your competitors will be happy to learn. It is people that are responsible for the success or failure of a business and thus one should take utmost care of their hiring process.

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” — Jim Collins

Here are five points that makes LinkedIn inefficient for hiring. The good news is that there are workarounds to them that I have listed here.

Problem #1: I don’t have a huge network

The massive user-base LinkedIn boasts of is practically of no use to you. LinkedIn restricts your talent discovery up to your 3rd degree network. Even buying LinkedIn's premium subscription won’t give you access to profiles of people beyond your 3rd degree network. Taking an average LinkedIn network size of 300 people per user, you can connect to approximately 90,000 LinkedIn profiles and access 26,910,000 LinkedIn profiles. Which means, you are missing out 373,090,000 profiles or 92.7% of all of LinkedIn profiles. Whatever methods you use, you will be viewing only 7.3% of all LinkedIn profiles.

LinkedIn First Degree Network Size

Let me help you with a workaround here: Expand your network! You can only expand your network to have a greater accessible network on LinkedIn. This can be done in two ways: 1) Connecting with more people and 2) Joining groups. Don’t connect by sending connection requests to anyone at sight, something that LinkedIn promotes. That will give you poor results. There is a way to do it efficiently. Search for ‘LION’ in the LinkedIn search bar. No, they are neither the animal nor members of the Lion’s Club. They are LinkedIn Open Networkers, in short LIONs. Most of them have huge networks. They work hard to build their huge networks. Send them connection requests. Once connected, their 1st degree network becomes your 2nd degree network and their 2nd degree network becomes your 3rd degree network. Then join 50 groups (that is the upper limit to joining the number of groups on LinkedIn) where you could find the type of people you are looking for. People from groups could be beyond your 3rd degree network, yet you can see their profiles as you both share the same group. If I am hiring an Android developer I will search Android development related groups. Connect with as many of them as possible. If you are able to connect with people beyond your 3rd degree network on LinkedIn, you will take a huge jump in increasing your LinkedIn network size.

Problem #2: I have a huge network now but LinkedIn's search result limit is frustrating

Even though LinkedIn shows you a total count of millions of people in your search result, it allows you to view only the top 100 pages. Which means that having a huge network has only resulted in getting you access to the first 1000 of the most popular profiles that match your search query. Here you will generally find people who have moved long back from the position you searched for to a higher position. These people are of no use now. Even if you find few people of your interest, you are missing out on a lot of others, simply because they are not active on LinkedIn.

Another bummer. View the first 300 search results and LinkedIn will prompt you to buy the premium account or come again next month. What will you go for?

The message LinkedIn shows after reaching the 300 search result limit under free subscription

Let me help you with another workaround here: Filters! Play around with the filters and find more people who could be of your interest. This helps but it still doesn’t help you find the talent that is less active on LinkedIn.

How to get beyond the 300 profile search result limit? Buy the premium! The most expensive one. Don’t worry. It won’t cost you. Premium subscription is free for the first 30 days. Just remember to cancel before 30 days get over or you will be charged for the next 30 days. Use Google Calendar and register a reminder event for the 29th day from now. Make the most of these 29 days of premium account membership. The membership doesn’t grant you the access to view the profiles beyond the first 100 pages of any search result but unlimited search attempts is assured.

Problem #3: LinkedIn is workable now but the people I reach out to are non-responsive

LinkedIn being more than a hiring platform — a professional networking platform — people from all backgrounds come on to it, create their profiles and just be. Some of them are definitely looking out for jobs actively, but most are just there — networking, generating sales leads, whiling away their time, or not active for months or years.

Let me help you with a little expensive workaround here: Post a job on LinkedIn. It will cost you approximately INR 1,700 per month per job and get active job seekers reach out to you.

Problem #4: I posted a job and got 300 applications on LinkedIn but most are irrelevant

Before I unearth why the irrelevant applications come through let me educate you that that number (300) could have been much higher if every-potential-body knew about your job opening. There are hundreds of similar job postings on LinkedIn. It is quite possible that for some job seekers your job is put on the 10th page of their search result where they never reach to see. That is one problem. The other is that for some job seekers your job posting would be on the front few pages grabbing every eyeball. Have you ever tried applying to jobs on LinkedIn? It can be done simply with a click of a button. That ease of applying to a job is the reason for most of the irrelevant applications you receive. Now you are burdened with filtering the irrelevant ones from the relevant ones. You might have never got any applications from the good ones who didn’t come across your job or the ones who didn’t try LinkedIn for job search.

Coming to the workaround to these problems: Post the job on your website and direct people applying on LinkedIn to the website. Most people that are not serious will skip applying to your job as it requires more than a click of a button. Unfortunately, there is NO workaround to tapping the people who do not discover your jobs in the first place.

Problem #5: I have posted a cool image on LinkedIn about the job opening but even that isn’t working

I enjoy seeing some cool posters developed to attract job seekers. It also helps to portray a good brand image of the company. But the sad part is that it also attracts wannabes. Unqualified people who get excited about the cool things apply too.That is just a small problem. The big problem is that the information about the job opening reaches to just a part of the active users from your LinkedIn network. Let’s take an hypothetical situation with all the best possibilities. Say, you post an image telling people about a job opening of “Business Developer”. Your network size is of 2000 people, out of them people active on LinkedIn on that particular day are 100, out of them, people who see the image you posted are just 50, out of that small number, business developers are 5, out of them only 2 are active job seekers, and only 1 is willing to work at the mentioned location. He applies. You interview and learn that he is not a good fit for the company. You will have to keep posting for days together to see some positive output.

Conversion funnel of a creative LinkedIn post for a job opening

Here is the workaround for this problem: In the image post that you create, ask a question that people could respond to in the comments. If a person likes, shares or comments on a post, her/his network is also able to see the post. You could mention something like this: “Like or comment to show interest”. This way you can reach out to more people than you could possibly have with a simple post. Unfortunately, there is no workaround to avoid the wannabes from applying through your post.

A Better Hiring Solution: SocialHelpouts

Instead of a list of workarounds I would rather suggest you to use SocialHelpouts. It is a people discovery platform for hiring. It is one of the most efficient methods of hiring. Here is why:

100% active job seekers

You will find only the active job seekers on SocialHelpouts with the information of their last active date on the platform as an indicator of their willingness to look for a change.

See everyone who match and in the order you love

You don’t miss out anyone who is a good fit and could be a potential employee. In fact you see them in the order of the most relevant and probable one first to the least relevant and probable one at the end (not on the basis of popularity). The platform doesn’t match just the skills that you are looking for in a candidate but also personal preferences of you and the candidate. So if in case you are a product startup with small team, you can see people who are willing to join you.

100% visibility to the ones who should see

On SocialHelpouts your jobs are visible to 100% of the users who are looking out for a role like the ones you have in the offering. And the more often you visit, the better visibility you get.

Few but no irrelevant applications

It is NOT as easy to apply to jobs on SocialHelpouts as it is at other places. One has to spend credits to apply to jobs. Credits are limited so a carefully applies only to the ones which are a good fit according to her/him. It doesn’t restrict anyone from applying to more jobs but for that they must have more credits, which can be earned by doing some tasks. This makes it less likely that you will get irrelevant applications to your job.

Get your network to help you in your candidate search

There are two simple ways this can be done on SocialHelpouts:

1. Recommendations: Say, one of your friend is also in a hiring position. He talks to a candidate and finds him as a good talent but for some reason couldn’t hire him. Wouldn’t it be great if this friend tells you about this candidate he liked? You would instantly get a good candidate. Saves a lot of your time and efforts in finding great talent. Well, that is already happening only on SocialHelpouts. People who pass on a good talent recommend them to other people hiring in their network.
2. Network for Help: Say, you have a job opening. What do you do in general? You tell the people you come across about the opening and ask them to suggest someone or simply spread the word in their network. They do help by reaching out to a few, but only to the ones who are on the top of their mind at that moment. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could see all the people in your network who could be of help and reach out to them with a click of a button? Wouldn’t it be awesomer if your friends could see everyone in their network and choose the ones to share the information with? Well, even that is happening on SocialHelpouts.

SocialHelpouts is on a mission to solve the hiring problem for employers globally and they are pretty much there. If this was helpful to you, please be generous to like and recommend. Do share this peace of information with friends too :) And as always #HappyHiring!