If you want to hire the best, you have to recruit like the best! LinkedIn Recruiter is the bread and butter of every recruiter, but unless you come from a recruiting background, most founders struggle to use it effectively. Having been in the talent space for quite some time, I’ll share how top recruiters effectively leverage LinkedIn recruiter filters.

Job Titles Filter

Begin your LinkedIn search by setting up Job Titles filters. From my experience recruiting in the past, Job Titles filters are better used for more functional roles such as Product Managers, Engineering Managers, and Data Engineers. Technical roles are a bit more difficult since the keywords and skills are more important criteria for filtering out the specific people you're interested in.

Locations Filter

Next, you want to set up your locations filters. If you’re startup is in-person, make sure you include your city, and if you’re hybrid, make sure to include any neighboring cities too. For remote, you can filter by states to find people who are in your timezone before expanding nationwide once exhaust the states in your timezone.

Skills Filter

The skills filter is incredibly important for technical roles. Remember that you can input multiple skills with AND/OR statements and it defaults to OR if you don’t put anything. One thing to note is that skills only filter based on what candidates put in the skills section of their profile. For example, if they wrote that they know “Golang” in their job description but not in their skills section, this candidate will get filtered out. The main limitation of the skills filter is that many software engineers don’t include their programming languages and technologies in their profile which means a lot of talent gets filtered out. In situations like these, it’s better to use platforms such as Noon and Seekout that aggregate data from platforms like GitHub and Stack Overflow.

Companies Filter

The companies filter is great for poaching talent from specific companies or competitors. You can also use it to exclude companies that you don’t want appearing in your search. Unfortunately, you can’t search for groups of companies. For instance, if you specifically want designers who have previously worked at a fintech startup from series A to C, you won’t be able to do that on LinkedIn. There are alternative platforms such as Noon which allow you to specifically query for 0-1 engineers and talent that have previously worked at an early-stage startup.

Keywords Filter

Keywords will be your go-to filter for getting the exact results you want. Unlike the previous filters, the keywords filter will search the entire profile instead of specific sections of the profile and this will reflect in the search results. LinkedIn is not very intelligent, so you have to input a different keywords and see what works. Tis is definitely a process of trial and error.

Keywords for Diversity

If you’re looking to filter specifically for underrepresented groups, you won’t be able to search for gender and race on LinkedIn Recruiting. The workaround is to try guessing and searching for the types of organizations that these groups would typically be associated with. For instance, you can try searching for specific associations, nonprofits, and universities. Here are some template booleans you can directly enter into LinkedIn Recruiter:

How to search for non-male candidates

This search takes advantage of any pronouns that people might have included in their profile. Here are some filters you can use:

"Women" OR "Sisters" OR "Mothers" OR "Lady" OR "Mrs." OR "Miss" OR "Sister" OR "Mother" OR "Her" OR "She" OR "Ladies" OR "Woman"

"She" OR "Mom" OR "Sisters" OR "Mother" OR "Female" OR "Missus" OR "Herself" OR "Lady" OR "Her" OR "Wife" OR "Mrs." OR "Females" OR "Girls" OR "Mum" OR "Aunt" OR "Grandmother" OR "Sister" OR "Missis" OR "Niece" OR "Hers" OR "Woman" OR "Ladies" OR "Girls"

Fraternity/Sorority search

Targeting campus groups, e.g. fraternities/sororites, is a great way to target specific communities. For example, if you're looking to source African American candidates, you can use the African American Greek System filter below to search for them.

Female Greek System

"Alpha Gamma" OR "Kappa Delta Chi" OR "Kappa Kappa Gamma" OR "Pi Beta Phi" OR "Gamma Phi Beta" OR "Chi Omega" OR "Delta Gamma" OR "Alpha Delta Pi" OR "Alpha Phi" OR "Delta Delta Delta" OR "Sigma Kappa" OR "Kappa Alpha Theta" OR "Delta Alpha Omicron Pi"

African American Greek System

"Phi Delta Psi" OR "Zeta Phi Beta" OR "Phi Beta Sigma" OR "Alpha Kappa Alpha" OR "Omega Psi Phi" OR "Alpha Omega Nu" OR "Kappa Alpha Psi" OR "Iota Phi Theta" OR "Groove Phi Groove" OR "Sigma Gamma Rho" OR "Alpha Gamma Phi Delta" OR "Delta Sigma Theta" OR "Alpha Phi Alpha"

Hispanic Greek System

"Phi Iota Alpha" OR "Omega Phi Beta" OR "Lambda Upsilon Lambda" OR "Sigma Iota Alpha" OR "Gamma Alpha Omega" OR "Gamma Zeta Alpha" OR "Lambda Sigma Upsilon" OR "Lambda Pi Chi" OR "Lambda Pi Upsilon" OR "Alpha Psi Lambda" OR "Gamma Phi Omega" OR "Kappa Delta Chi" OR "Alpha Pi Sigma" OR "Lambda Theta Nu" OR "Lambda Alpha Upsilon" OR "Sigma Lambda Upsilon"

Asian Pacific Island Organizations

"Kappa Zeta Phi" OR "Alpha Sigma Rho" OR "Sigma Psi Zeta" OR "Lambda Phi Epsilon" OR "Pi Delta Psi" OR "Delta Lambda Chi" OR "Phi Alpha Omicron" OR "Kappa Beta Zeta" OR "Gamma Alpha Omega" OR "Phi Delta Sigma" OR "Alpha Sigma Lambda" OR "Beta Omega Phi" OR "Alpha Psi Lambda" OR "Chi Sigma Tau" OR "Theta Kappa Phi" OR "Gamma Beta" OR "Phi Zeta Tau" OR "Rho Psi" OR "Phi Zeta Tau" OR "Lambda Alpha Phi"

While using the above booleans is a good workaround, as you can see, LinkedIn Recruiter does have several limitations when it comes to finding diverse candidates. It also misses a significant number of candidates (e.g. those with bare LinkedIn profiles or those that just did not participate in this groups in college). There are a few alternative platforms to LinkedIn such as Noon and Entelo that allow you to directly filter by race and gender. These platforms leverage machine learning and alternative data to let you directly source from underrepresented groups.

LinkedIn InMail

Now that you’ve built out a list of candidates you think are a great fit for your role, it’s time to message them. This is arguably the most difficult challenge of any recruiter’s job: getting the candidate to respond. Chances are if you like that candidate, hundreds of other recruiters also like that candidate.

The best strategy is to always personalize the message as much as possible to stand out from the hundreds of other recruiter messages that the candidate is receiving. Make sure to reference how their professional experiences are a great fit for your role and refine your pitch to best match what you think this candidate is looking for.

After that initial, InMail, it’s important to send followup messages in case the candidate missed your initial message and to stay top-of-mind for them. I recommend at least 3 follow-up messages per candidate. I know. This can be very tedious, but you have to do this since the talent market is so competitive right now.

If, after all these follow ups, the candidate still hasn’t responded, one trick that I’ve found really effective is having another person from your team messaging them and saying something along the lines of: “Hey {First Name}, I know my colleague Joe already messaged you but we think you’re an absolutely stellar candidate for this role for X, Y, Z reasons, and the whole team is really excited to have you potentially join us.” Obviously, this messaging needs a bit more polishing, but I’m sure you get the gist.

It is important to note that this approach can be time-consuming and draining, as the majority of messages sent may not receive a response. To optimize your efforts and save time, consider using tools like Noon or Gem which allow the automation of most of these processes. For instance, Noon is used by several of the most talent-dense startups from Retool to Replit to reach the exact candidates you want, at the scale you want, while highly personalizing each interaction.

If you're currently hiring engineers and would like to try out Noon, use this link to sign up, and you’ll get a 45-day trial!