By now, you know that businesses of any kind need to be on LinkedIn, especially if you’re a B2B business—that’s where your clients are. One-third of B2B marketers name the professional social network their top choice. But there’s another big reason to be on LinkedIn, even if your customers are plucked from the public at large: The general public is on LinkedIn as employees, career-conscious workers, and job hunters. That’s not a surprise: 85 per cent of all jobs are filled via networking. What might be a surprise is how you can use LinkedIn’s newest features to turn your brand into a top-talent attracting machine.
Here’s how (and why) you’ll want to do just that.
What Are LinkedIn Career Pages?
LinkedIn may seem like it’s behind the curve when it comes to both organic and paid reach. It hasn’t been a product marketing machine like Facebook, which added business pages in 2007, and Twitter, which added promoted Tweets in 2010. Even though LinkedIn users are especially professionally minded, the platform simply isn’t set up to drive sales of products. Instead, LinkedIn is about professional branding.
Career Pages empower organizations to take their branding to the next level with highly customizable modules and tools. You can essentially turn jobs themselves into products, with benefits such as making extra money, feelings of fulfillment, and enjoyment during the workday.
How to Use Career Pages
How do you take advantage of the new features? LinkedIn will help you get started by automatically migrating content from your existing business profile onto the new Career Pages. This content includes your hero image, any open job opportunities, and employee testimonials. These items will automatically live under the Overview, Jobs, or Life tabs. You can take it from there by moving these items around and adding your own custom modules, such as:
- Company Leaders: Feature the executives in your company so users know who steers the ship.
- Photo Gallery: Help users envision company culture by posting photos of typical workdays, company events, and what your office looks like.
- Employee Perspectives: Here’s where you can show off articles and other materials created by current employees.
- Meeting the Team: Automatically display profiles of employees that each individual user may work with if hired.
Additionally, Career Pages offer the ability to feature a hero video, instead of simply a still image, furthering your ability to tell your company story to prospective hires. And, just like the other social networks, you can track your LinkedIn metrics such as visitor demographics, impressions, clicks, likes, and more to guide your marketing efforts for efficiency, engagement, and effectiveness.
The LinkedIn Algorithm
You’ve perfected your Career Pages to show your company in the best possible light. But what do potential employees see?
That depends on the user. Just as Facebook customizes each user’s feed based on their profiles, views, and engagement, LinkedIn customizes which parts of your Company Pages are featured for each potential employee.
For example, let’s say you added a module featuring who a potential employee may work with at your company. A user who currently works as an accountant will see the profile of your CFO, while a user who is currently looking for a position as a graphic designer may see the profile of a marketing manager or copywriter.
In addition, based on a user’s interests and behaviour, your company may pop up as a potential career option without the user performing a job search or inputting any filters into a search. This captures the attention of users who weren’t actively looking for a career change—that is, until the perfect job shows up in their feeds.
Benefits of Career Pages
Career Pages are up and running for many companies, and even during the platform’s early trial period the results were astonishing. Brands saw a 60 per cent increase in pageviews per visitor and a 175 per cent increase in job views. For companies that struggle to capture the interest of top candidates, this is huge. But there are other potential benefits as well.
Let’s say that instead of having trouble attracting candidates, you have the opposite problem: You have to wade through resume after resume for a single opening. Or perhaps you’ve had a high turnover rate in some positions. Now users see demographics, such as education level, experience, and skills, on who already works with your company, giving them a better idea of whether they’ll fit in.
LinkedIn’s new features show potential applicants a more well-rounded picture of what it’s like to work with you. When harnessed, those features could help the wrong candidates self-select themselves out of the applicant pool while drawing the right ones closer than ever.
