How to Post Jobs in LinkedIn Groups

With over a million LinkedIn groups created, you’ve probably already come to understand their potential as a recruitment tool. LinkedIn groups offer highly focused channels centered around particular expertise, experience, interest, or profession.

The optimal strategy for engaging with particular LinkedIn groups of interest to you unfortunately involves some work. Real participation in discussion, answering member questions, and sharing interesting articles with commentary are all necessary components to building a following within a particular group. However, if you also want to post jobs in LinkedIn groups, you may have found there are quite a few ways to go about it.

Of course, the most focused way to post jobs on LinkedIn is through their commercial job posting service. If you post a job on LinkedIn, you can then share that job post with any number of groups that you belong to. Additionally, commercial job posts will be shared automatically with groups through the jobs tab, so long as the LinkedIn group manager has set up the proper feed of relevant job titles into the jobs section.

However, it can seem like a long and manual process to regularly share your open jobs from your company website. For the jobs on your career site, here is the easiest way to build traction for your job postings through LinkedIn groups:

• Make sure that your job posts have a LinkedIn share button. Your IT department or website administrator will most likely have to be involved, but the actual implementation should only take a few minutes. Each job post will then have a LinkedIn share button that viewers can use to share jobs  with their network.
• Once you have the LinkedIn share button installed, ensure that you and your staff belong to the proper groups. You should belong to all of the largest groups in the different areas of your recruitment interest – you should belong to no less than ten groups. To find LinkedIn groups of interest, simply search for relevant keywords in the groups search bar across the top right corner of LinkedIn. If you recruit for accountants, for example, make sure you join the top five groups for accountants.
• Unless you have an extremely narrow niche in recruiting, you probably recruit for diverse skill sets. Make sure that you systematically think of the top jobs that you recruit for, make a list, and then join groups of each profession type.
• Once you have the LinkedIn share button and the LinkedIn groups set up, you’re ready to post jobs in LinkedIn groups. Simply click the share button on the job page that you want to share with groups. You will be asked if you want to update your “network status” or post the link in a group. You may start typing any of the groups you belong to, and LinkedIn will allow you to select a list of groups. Click the share button and you’re done!
• Be sure that you are not spamming groups with your jobs! This is a sure fire way to get booted out of groups. However, if you keep a list of the groups you belong to taped to your desk, you will be ready to post jobs only into relevant groups. In general, if you post a “real” accounting job into an accounting group, the group manager will not take offense. The issue for managers is when recruiters post multiple jobs at once and/or irrelevant jobs to the group. In fact, if you post jobs in a highly selective way to very specific groups, most managers and members will appreciate your participation.
• Be sure to participate in the LinkedIn groups that you post jobs to. If you use groups, but don’t ever put back in, you will not be in everyone’s good graces for very long. Remember, because you joined the most relevant groups for your industry, you can quickly spread a reputation among people that matter to you – make sure it’s a positive one!

LinkedIn group postings won’t substitute for their paid job posting service or other major job boards. However, the niche and focused nature of LinkedIn groups make them ideal ways to diversify your recruitment marketing efforts. Especially when compounded with multiple recruiters and effort of your company, it has the potential to become a significant source of applicants and traffic to your jobs.

It’s something that you are probably already doing, but as with most things in recruitment, it pays to build a long-term strategy and implement consistent methods for your whole team.