Tips for using LinkedIn ads for recruitment

Here are three ways to get the most out of recruitment ads—

Select your audience criteria

One of the benefits of using the LinkedIn platform to promote job openings at your business is their audience criteria filtering. Because the platform is built for professionals, there is more data in LinkedIn about users’ job titles, education levels, job histories, and more.

To define your target job applicant pool, answer questions like:

• Where do they live?
• Where do they work?
• What is their education level and/or field of study?
• What are they interested in?

You can be as specific or as broad as you would like with these filters. As you add more filters, your audience’s estimated size will narrow in. While this may seem like a negative to decrease the audience size, consider that by filtering the audience criteria, you are helping to ensure your job ad will be seen by the most qualified candidates and your ad spend is, therefore, more likely to result in better options for your hiring team.



Defining the audience may be the most important part of your ad strategy for a LinkedIn recruitment ad, but you’ll make other decisions, such as primary conversion goal, ad format, and more. HubSpot’s Beginner’s Guide to LinkedIn Ad Campaigns is a good resource.

Be strategic about the landing page experience

Unless you are running a promotion on a LinkedIn job posting, you’ll be pointing your users to a specific page on the web where they can review position requirements and apply for the job.

Listings sites, like Indeed and Monster, are popularly searched but have little opportunity to customize the user experience. Job descriptions are copied and pasted into plain-text editors, with no ability to apply custom styles and branding.

Alternatively, some businesses prepare custom landing pages on their own website to give potential hires a taste of their brand, workplace culture, and values in a user-friendly way. This method takes time and effort to set up and maintain, but it can set your business apart from the thousands of generic job postings online.

Monitor your results and adjust accordingly

Once your ad is up and running, don’t just set it and forget it! Monitor your results and spending to see if there are opportunities to optimize the ads. If you find your ads are going through budget too quickly, you might set a daily cap or add some additional filters to your audience to decrease its size.

You may find that one ad outperforms the others, depending on the metrics you are tracking. Performance metrics examples include:

• Cost per click
• Number of impressions
• Number of submissions
• Quality of candidates who submit from the ad

High clicks but low quality in the applicants indicate you may want to tweak your audience or ad copy to better target your preferred audience targets.

Ultimately, using LinkedIn ads for recruiting is an art and a science. Optimize your audience targets, landing page experience, and performance metrics by considering who your ideal candidates are and what will appeal to them most.
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