How to Post Jobs on LinkedIn, a Small Business Owner’s Guide

After being acquired by Microsoft, LinkedIn has implemented more features to increase its user base, and by all accounts it has worked. LinkedIn now has surpassed 500 million users and it is growing. This means posting a job for your small business on the site will give you a large talent pool of applicants as the numbers continue to increase.

So how do you post a job on LinkedIn? It is actually very simple, and the company has gone out of its way to limit the number of steps needed to post a job.

Here is a step by step process to post a job on LinkedIn on your personal profile, company or group page. This will require a LinkedIn account, so if you don’t have one, create one here. After you create the account go ahead and login.

How to Post Jobs on LinkedIn

In your home page, you can click the Job or Work buttons to post a job. This will open a window, where you will see another button that says Post a Job. Click on it.

LinkedIn customers who are recruiters will be redirected to a different page. Everyone else will use this page, where you will fill out your business name, position and location. Once you fill it out, click continue.

This page contains more detailed information about the position, as well as your business, notifications the industry, how you would like people to apply, and employment type (full-time, etc.). When you are done, click continue.

Next you will set the budget for your post. LinkedIn uses a pay-per-click model, setting the budget limit is extremely important. This will ensure your post doesn’t exceed your budget. You only pay when candidates click to view your job.

LinkedIn recommends the amount based on location and the type of job. You can accept it, or set your own budget. Click continue when you are done.

This is where you verify the information you have provided. If everything is correct, fill in the payment information. You can use your credit card or PayPal to make the payment.  Click review order, followed by post job, and you are done.

Once the job is posted you will receive a confirmation email. The post will appear on your company page (if you have one) and LinkedIn will share it with professionals whose skills and location match the job via email across its community. Users can also find it through search.

You can manage the job post using some of the tools LinkedIn provides. These include profiling matches aligning with your job posting and reaching out to your Profile Matches directly. But they also include tracking and managing your applicants and gaining insight into job viewer and applicant analytics. Some of these services are free, while others require a fee.

Pay-Per-Click Model

The way LinkedIn has it setup, you can only be charged up to 1.3 times your daily average budget during the course of one day. As an example, a company placing an add with a $10 daily budget will not be charged more than $13 per day if the add gets additional views. A 30 day period with the maximum view will total $390.

It is important to remember you will only get charged when candidates click to view your job. So you are only paying for reaching people potentially interested in the position. The $390 shouldn’t scare you away from using the LinkedIn platform. It represents the maximum potential spend in such a situation.

As long as the job remains open, LinkedIn uses a monthly billing cycle for the invoice. You can close your job at any time without any penalties.

Other Ways to Post a Job on LinkedIn

If you do a lot of recruiting, LinkedIn has two subscription services: LinkedIn Recruiter and LinkedIn Recruiter Lite. They provide more access to candidates, more InMails, the ability to identify lists of people who have viewed your ads in the last 90 days and more.

LinkedIn Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "How to Post Jobs on LinkedIn, a Small Business Owner’s Guide" was first published on Small Business Trends