Circleboom is growing its marketing and business development team. And the story begins with me being tasked with creating a job post on LinkedIn for Circleboom. It was not just a simple job post though. Rather, I was asked to find candidates who have excellent levels of English, are at least a bit familiar with marketing, have at least 1 year of professional experience, and have graduated from specific schools. That’s where it got fancy. The “hard” part was not posting jobs on LinkedIn, but it was the targeting.
When I say targeting, I don’t mean just filtering out the candidates, but also “only” attracting candidates with such criteria to apply to the vacant positions. The reason was simple: going over a resume means spending time. Of course, not every applicant will be hired. But when most of the applicants don’t match the criteria, then the entire process becomes too time-consuming, not to mention the applicant limits. Besides, if I was to promote the job post, then I also needed to make sure that every dollar spent was worth it.
I had created some job posts on LinkedIn before and even worked on anonymous ones, but none of them was aiming for such a thing. So this entire process became a learning for me. That’s why I want to share my insights. But first thing first, let’s start with the basics.
How to Post a Job on LinkedIn
There are 3 common ways of posting a job vacancy on LinkedIn.
Method #1
The first way is not much different than posting anything else on LinkedIn really, either as a user or a page admin. Simply click on “Start a Post,” choose “Share that you are hiring,” and fill in the relevant details.
If you do this on your home page’s timeline, you will be asked to select a company among which you are page admins. And the post will be seen as originally created by you. If you create the job post directly from your company page, then the original job post belongs to the page (which I always prefer, or I might be perceived as a hiring decision-maker by the applicants). Don't forget to check the best practices from the related LinkedIn help page.
Method #2
As another option, you can create a job post through your job posting account. All you need to do is select “Post a Job” under the tab of “Business” when you’re on LinkedIn. Then again, you will be asked to choose the company and enter other details.
Method #3
The final way is even simpler, and it’s an old-school run-around: You can always post that you are hiring as plain text (enriching the post with visuals is of course an option). Just prepare your text talking about the vacant position, paste it on LinkedIn, and post it like you post anything else. You can, again, post like this personally or from the company page. There are of course downsides to that, such as having to track everything manually, or your post not being seen under LinkedIn Jobs. We’ll talk about this in more detail later on.
Other than these, you can of course choose to use LinkedIn’s related recruitment products, which I will also mention later in this post, or maybe even use some third-party tools. But these three are the most common and the easiest ways of posting jobs on LinkedIn.
Can You Post Jobs on LinkedIn for Free
Of course, you can. All the options stated above are free to begin with. The possible costs will emerge later on, as you become more and more demanding for promotion and attracting top talent. So one can say that it is always free to post a job on LinkedIn, but again, always with limitations.
LinkedIn Free Job Post Limit
The story of me writing this post actually begins with this limit. It has to do with how many free jobs you can post on LinkedIn, how long it stays, and other limitations to LinkedIn free job posting.
- You can only post one free LinkedIn job post at a time. Even though you pause it, you can’t create another one. So you need to close one before proceeding with the other.
- If you post a job on LinkedIn for free, there is also an applicant limit of around 50. Then it becomes paused automatically, asking for you to start spending money on it.
- There is also a time limit to that. So even though you don’t get 50 applicants, your free job post gets paused automatically after 21 days.
- In order to prevent users from running around these limits, LinkedIn also prevents you from closing and re-opening the same job post within 7 days. So if you want to keep on receiving applicants for free, you need to create the same job post and post it from scratch again.
I figured out most of these by checking the related LinkedIn help page after wondering why my job post was not attracting more candidates. Then I found the solution of re-creating the same job post multiple times, each receiving around 50 applicants. But there was still a problem: Most of the candidates were far from fulfilling the requirements. Even though I added screening questions, I was still unable to prevent people from seeing Circleboom’s job post and applying. After a few days, I ended up with 4 closed job posts, each having around 50 applicants, leaving me with 200 resumes to go through.
I knew at the very first moment that I needed to use LinkedIn job ads. I even saw people’s job ads on Linkedin ads library. But there were also problems with that, which I will tell down below. Utilizing a LinkedIn email finder can significantly streamline the recruitment process, enabling direct and personalized communication with potential candidates.
Cost to Post a Job on LinkedIn
I had already figured out by then that the real cost of posting a job on LinkedIn had to include the time and effort that I spent. Jokes aside, the cost to post a job on LinkedIn itself is literally zero. But it’s really hard to attract some quality talent by keeping your job post-free.
Finally, with the approval of the CMO, I started with LinkedIn-promoted jobs. The plan was simple, we were going to spend a relatively small budget, and if the outcome was good, then we would keep on.
LinkedIn Promoted Jobs
After you are done with your LinkedIn free job post limit, LinkedIn asks you to promote your job post. Then you will have no problem with applicant limits. Besides, your job posts will appear at the top of search results.
LinkedIn may give you a free trial to use promoted jobs (at least it gave me back then), and after that trial, it spends up to $57 a day (and the minimum spending was around $5) to promote your job. It spends as your job post receives clicks, and it is also a good way to keep your job post active.
Sounds just fine, isn’t it? Almost... If we didn’t insist on targeting. Because promoting a job post on LinkedIn like this also didn’t let me apply detailed targeting options. Yes, I kept receiving even more applicants as the worth of the money spent. But without targeting, this only meant going through many more resumes without even knowing whether the applicant got what we were looking for or not.
Not to make it like a movie series where they give you the prologue in later movies, but did I tell you that I had a few years of experience with LinkedIn ads? Though none of the campaigns I created or managed on LinkedIn included job ads, I knew theoretically that you were able to create job ads on LinkedIn through the LinkedIn campaign manager.
Can you Really Create a LinkedIn Job Ad?
I knew that I could have promoted to any single post even without setting up a LinkedIn campaign manager. But to access the detailed targeting options of LinkedIn, I had to go through the campaign manager. So I set it up and started creating the campaign. Dates, target audience, budget, daily spending limits, bidding strategy... All was done. I was sure that it was going to work this time.
I knew that the platform wanted me to spend money to keep the job post active. So I thought that all would be fine if I spent money through the campaign manager. How else could it be possible for me to see advertised jobs through the LinkedIn Ad Library?
Turns out that I was wrong. The job post was limited by the number of applicants once more, telling me that the “job is no longer accepting applications.” The campaign couldn’t even start spending, but the organic applications hit 50. As the job post itself was counted as the “asset” of the ad campaign, the platform said the asset was inactive and couldn’t start advertising.
What about LinkedIn Talent Solutions?
The next move was to check LinkedIn Talent Solutions. But nowhere on the help pages of LinkedIn did it say anything about targeting. All they offered was advanced filtering, messaging opportunities, detailed analytics, etc. But they still didn’t tell me how to make my job post appear before only a specific group of people.
I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, and it was time for me to get some professional help. I contacted someone from LinkedIn Talent Solutions, booked a meeting, and also created a ticket for the LinkedIn support team. I told the entire story to both, worried that I had to spend on two different places only to make “some” of the applications suit our needs.
During our meeting, I was informed that the LinkedIn Talent Solutions team is only responsible for finding the right talent solution for our needs. So they were unable to answer my question And given the fact that they didn’t offer the targeting options I needed, neither LinkedIn Recruiter nor any other LinkedIn talent solution was enough for me to get what I needed. The support team wasn’t very helpful either, telling me nothing more than what I already knew...
Our Own Solution: Posting a Job on LinkedIn with Advanced Targeting
I was frustrated after wasting a lot of time and energy, and I still had no results. The only solution that seemed to be left was to spend on two different sides. So I activated the job promotion to keep my job post active and also started my campaign. Guess what? Again, didn’t work. I had to spend up to $56 to promote my job with no targeting, but when that limit was reached, the job post became paused again... And during the time it takes for the job post to spend 56 USD, my job ad was able to spend only a few dollars before pausing.
After spending around $100 in total, we had 180 more applicants, but only 5% of them were within our target. Let me do a quick math here for the reference: 50 applicants were coming from the free job post already. And I got 9 from my LinkedIn job ad via the campaign manager ($0.37 per application, but wasn't sustainable). The rest 121 applicants cost $98 to attract. Good thing that it was within the free trial, so we weren’t billed that $98. But I can tell you that promoting a job post on LinkedIn like this brought in a single candidate for around $0.81. This was the story behind my spoiler of $0.81 above.
Still not receiving applicants matching our criteria, I turned to the last resort, which was also the 3rd way of posting a job on LinkedIn. I was going to create a plain text post, add an email at the end to receive applications, advertise on it with whatever targeting I liked, and call it a LinkedIn job ad. This was also problematic because it was all about crossing your fingers and hoping that people would read it til the end to see the email address for contact. It was also a bit far from looking professional. But at least it was accurate in terms of getting the applicants we need.
So I logged on to Circleboom Publish and chose Circleboom's company page among multiple LinkedIn company pages I manage, which were all connected to Circleboom thanks to its feature allowing me to manage multiple LinkedIn accounts. Then I started creating the job post but something was off and I didn't have much time to put into it, so I used Circleboom's built-in ChatGPT-4 to help me as its LinkedIn post creator. As the final step, I scheduled my LinkedIn post and started waiting for the results.
Circleboom Publish
Circleboom supports Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, and TikTok (soon).
I'm telling this part too, because it happens to all of us. Sometimes we get this cloudy mind and no ideas pop up to such an extent that don't even know how to announce our new job or properly thank someone. Sometimes we don't really have time or skills to find or create quality content. Or, we just view social media management as a task to automate. We are in the age of AI, aren't we?
Fatih Kemal Oksuzoglu
But no worries, as Circleboom helps with all of these. Out of ideas?
- Curate high-quality articles. The art director is off to a leave and you've never designed a post?
- Use ready-made templates.
- Want to automate your feed? Connect RSS feeds with your profile and even your company page. All possible via Circleboom Publish.
Then you'll see
- How your LinkedIn connections turn into your followers,
- How it affects your LinkedIn lead generation process,
- How your LinkedIn videos get high engagement,
- and How your business is promoted on LinkedIn to drive such growth like never before! Need more tips? Check out the related article.
Kevin O. Frank
The best part is yet to come: Circleboom Publish gives a 14-day trial for you to experience what else it has to offer for yourself! Check it out and give it a try, I'm sure you won't regret it.
At the end of all, we received many applicants by email after only spending around $70. (I don’t know the exact number of applicants as it wasn’t my email, which was another downside in terms of measurability, but at least my manager was happy with the results this time.) But the important thing is, I was able to keep it targeted. So every single cent here was well spent.
Conclusion
What to take from the story?
- Posting a job on Linkedin is free, but it comes with many limitations.
- The cost to post a job on Linkedin with promotion can go lower than $1 per applicant received.
- I personally recommend the use of promoted jobs or job ads (or what I did for advertising) rather than LinkedIn Recruiter or LinkedIn Recruiter Lite, especially if you are a small business and not a head hunter. But check all these in line with your needs before proceeding.
- LinkedIn support may not always be that helpful. I had similar experiences with the support teams of Meta in the past too. Because with very large organizations like this, the responsibilities of the individuals are limited, and it may be hard to reach out to the right person.
And if you want to learn more about the job opportunities here at Circleboom, please do not hesitate to visit our career page.
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