The Next Generation of LinkedIn Recruiter is Here

Since joining LinkedIn two years ago, I’ve been driving my team toward one goal: to reimagine how companies like yours find and hire the talented people who drive their business. We wanted to uncover new ways to tap into the extensive amount of insights and relationships on LinkedIn to make your job easier. And we did.

Last year at Talent Connect, we shared a preview of the next generation of LinkedIn Recruiter — our new, intuitive Recruiter experience, that leverages insights from LinkedIn’s network of 400+ million professionals to help you search faster, uncover new talent and focus on individuals who our data shows are more likely to engage. Today, we’re beyond thrilled to say this upgraded version is now available and has already rolled out to over 80% of our customers as a free upgrade.

Furthermore, it’s already helping customers save time searching for candidates. Compared to customers who use the original Recruiter, those who use the next generation of Recruiter are viewing 42% more profiles per search - meaning customers are finding more relevant talent in less time.

Why we designed the next generation of Recruiter

The foundation for the next generation of Recruiter is customer feedback from recruiters like you. We listened to comments from our customers that they submitted in product, in focus groups, and surveys and engaged one on one with recruiters from around the world and within our own LinkedIn TA team to understand what matters to you most. The goal was to identify your major challenges and resolve them to enable you to find candidates faster, so you can spend more time doing what you love — hiring.

Here’s what this means for you, in practice:

Let’s take those of you who work at small businesses, for example. We know you wear many hats; sourcing candidates is just one of the many things you do. This means (a) you don’t always have a lot of time to master LinkedIn Recruiter, and (b) you don’t always have a lot of time to recruit. The next generation of Recruiter solves this in a few ways.

An intuitive search bar to guide you

By simplifying how to start a search, Recruiter helps you find the right candidate even if you’re not an expert in the industry or function.

Let’s say you’re interested in hiring a project manager who is PMP certified, but don’t know all the terms to include in your search. Once you enter ‘project manager’ into the search bar, Recruiter will prompt you to select a location and then will suggest trending skills that are most common for people on LinkedIn with that same title. You don’t need to know how to develop a complex search string. You just need to know who you’re looking to hire, and we’ll guide you through the rest.

Easily find your ideal candidate

The next generation of Recruiter gives you a new, faster way to search for an ideal candidate that will make your hiring managers love you. It’s called the “Find more people like” feature. Now, when your hiring manager asks you to find someone just like their best sales director, it’s no longer such a daunting task. You can simply type in that person’s name (and a few more names if you wish to get even more targeted), and Recruiter will serve up a list of candidates who have the same job title and skills, and who work at companies and in industries similar to that person. Additionally, it will show you the exact keywords used to build the list, so you can understand the starting point, and refine your results from there.

“If I have a candidate that a hiring manager has given an excellent rating to, I'll go to "Find more people like." When the CEO says, "Do you remember that guy," I can go back and use their name to build a potential passive talent pool" says Ginamarie Zampano, HR Manager, Preferred Brands International

Smart search suggestions uncover new talent

Rest assured, simple doesn’t mean basic. We’ve made Recruiter easier to use for those of you who don’t have the time to invest in it, but we’ve also made it a whole lot more powerful for all of our users.

For those of you who are in Recruiter daily and love using Boolean, for example, you can absolutely still use it. Once your search results appear, the clean new interface surfaces the most common refinement filters, from which you can add or remove suggested keywords to improve your results and identify talent you may have otherwise not considered. These insights-driven search suggestions will update in real time, to offer the most relevant key terms at anytime. Your full list of advanced filters are also still available, we just moved them to a ‘view more’ link, to give you a cleaner page to work on.

Prioritize candidates who are more likely to engage

Whether you’re a heavy Recruiter user or not, chances are the open req on your desk needed to be filled yesterday. The last thing you need to do is spend hours combing through 1000+ search results.

Say hello to your new best friend, Spotlights. These new filters help you prioritize candidates who are more likely to engage with your company based on their relationships on LinkedIn, including if they previously applied to your company, if they are 1st degree connections with your employees, or if they’ve engaged with your talent brand — an indicator that they’re 2x more likely to respond to your InMail.

Additional Spotlights show you people who your competitors target, or who’ve been in their role for awhile. All of these Spotlights help you bring that 1000+ results page down to a focused list of warm leads so you can spend your time where it counts the most, hiring and not messaging new candidates.

As you can see, we built the new Recruiter with the needs of many different recruiters in mind, and we haven’t stopped yet. We’ll continue to incorporate your feedback on the new experience to ensure it’s meeting your needs.

On behalf of LinkedIn Talent Solutions, thank you. This product is the direct result of your feedback and we can’t wait to hear how Recruiter helps you drive success at your company.

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