"LinkedIn for recruiters" is searched 3,600 times a month in the UK and 14,800 in the US, and almost all the advice behind those searches is about chasing vanity metrics like impressions, likes, and comments.
There's very little advice about how to write LinkedIn posts that pay your bills by generating inbound leads and DMs from hiring managers. Hopefully, this blog will give you all the answers you need.
In short: LinkedIn posts turn into placements when you stop posting for applause and start posting for one specific hiring manager. Focus on the niche you recruit in and post content that resonates with your ideal clients. You don't need to go viral. Be consistent - keep posting for months. All you need is fifty hiring managers to keep seeing your content over and over until they trust you and think of your name when they next have a vacancy to fill.
Why most LinkedIn advice for recruiters is wrong
Most people giving recruiters advice about LinkedIn optimise for the wrong number. They tell you to post every day, focus on writing a clickbaity hook that creates uproar and virality, and celebrate huge view counts.
The problem with this strategy is that impressions aren't a currency you can pay your bills with. If your posts reach the wrong audience or disappoint your target audience, they're worthless. A common mistake is for recruiters to post content that speaks directly to other recruiters (e.g. client and candidate horror stories). These posts generally perform well in terms of likes, but unless you're a Rec2Rec, they're completely worthless to hiring managers and candidates you want to attract.
For recruiters, LinkedIn posts should have one purpose: repeatedly put your name, expertise, and credibility in front of clients and candidates you'd like to partner with. This makes your cold outreach warmer (because they recognise your name), and can increase the chances of receiving inbound DMs and enquiries that can convert into vacancies and placements.
Everything else - likes, followers, virality - are vanity metrics. I don't know about you, but I'd rather get 100 views and one DM from a hiring manager than 100,000+ views from other recruiters who will never buy my services.
Build your whole LinkedIn strategy with this mindset, and it becomes simple.
The pipeline mindset: post for one buyer
Recruiters who win big on LinkedIn treat it like any other business development activity. Before you write anything, decide who you're talking to. Not "my network", not "recruiters", but the specific person who signs off on the vacancies you want to win: the finance director who keeps losing employees, the head of engineering who can't fill a role, the founder scaling their first sales team.
Once you've named that person, think about their market, their hiring problems, their pain points, and what good looks like in the roles they fill. Then, write posts that address all of those things.
Post four types of content every week
Consistency beats brilliance, and the way to stay consistent is to never be faced with a blank page. To make sure that your LinkedIn posts reach ideal clients and candidates at every stage of their buying journey, aim to write four types of content. (This is the strategy the founder of MyCopyPal used to invoice £300,000 from LinkedIn in 12 months).
- Conversation starters (visibility). Write a post that talks about an industry-relevant opinion you have that a hiring manager will either nod at or argue with. "Most six-stage interview processes cost you the best candidate." These posts are designed to boost visibility, put your name in front of people in different corners of your target audience, and encourage people to comment and join the conversation.
- Valuable posts (expertise). Write a post that gives genuinely useful advice about something your ideal clients or candidates often struggle with: What salary should they be paying? Why is their search taking so long? How can they structure an offer that gets accepted? These posts will get fewer likes and impressions, but they'll reach people within your niche and make them see you as an expert.
- Personal posts (relatability). Write a post that tells a short, real story from your week on the desk. People buy from people, and a recruiter who's human is far more approachable than someone who appears super uptight and too "professional". But remember, try to angle these posts towards your ideal clients and candidates. Don't be tempted to write a recruitment horror story that gets views from other recruiters.
- Success stories (proof). Write a post that tells a story about a placement you made. What problem did you solve? How did you do it? What was the outcome? Like Valuable posts, Success Stories will naturally get fewer views and likes, but they'll improve your credibility.
Rotate those four across the week, and you'll cover every goal: get seen, be an expert, be approachable, be credible.
What to post as a recruiter: worked examples
Abstract advice is easy to nod at and hard to act on, so here are four posts you could publish this week, one of each type, for a recruiter filling finance roles in the North West.
- Conversation starter: "Three finance directors told me they'd rather leave a vacancy open than settle. I think they're right."
- Valuable: "Management Accountant salaries in Manchester have moved again. Here are the new ranges:"
- Personal: "I fell into recruitment 26 months ago and haven't looked back."
- Success story: "A PE-backed manufacturer had been trying to hire a financial controller for five months through three agencies. We filled it in three weeks."
How to post on LinkedIn consistently
Most recruiters give up on LinkedIn posts for one of three reasons.
- They don't know what to write about.
- They don't have time to write posts.
- They don't see any results.
MyCopyPal solves all three of these problems. You spend thirty minutes telling it about your niche, ideal clients/candidates, and your voice, and it builds you a personalised LinkedIn content strategy. You get a calendar that tells you which type of post to write on each day of the week, and it gives you three ideas to choose from and writes the post itself (in your voice!). It knows how to write LinkedIn posts that are designed to generate inbound leads from hiring managers, because it was built by an ex-recruiter who made £300,000 from LinkedIn and then spent years as a copywriter helping other recruiters do the same.
LinkedIn is the top of the funnel. When a hiring manager who's seen your posts for months finally has a role, they'll think of your name.