How To Use Sales Navigator For Recruiting? [2024 Tutorial]

Can you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for recruiting?

Yes.

Sales Navigator is even better than LinkedIn Recruiter because you can use the same tool to find clients and to find candidates.

On top of that, Sales Navigator is cheaper than LinkedIn Recruiter ($99/month vs $160/month)


In this article, I’ll show you all you need to know on how to use Sales Navigator for recruiting:

  1. How to use Sales Navigator to source candidates like in LinkedIn Recruiter
  2. How to use Sales Navigator to easily find client for your recruiting business

Let’s dive in.

How To Find Candidates on LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

Is LinkedIn recruiter same as Sales Navigator? No.

They are 2 different products. Funny thing is that LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a better option for recruiting businesses than Recruiter itself.

Let me show you how to fill your pipeline with top profiles using Sales Navigator.

Step #1: Use Sales Navigator Filters to Find Candidates

Sales Navigator has more filters than LinkedIn Recruiter.

Sales Navigator offers 29 filters.

use sales navigator filters to find candidates

Among them:

  • Current Job Title
  • Past Job Tile
  • Current Company
  • Past Company
  • School
  • Years of Experience
  • Years in Current Company
  • And More…

These filters are useful for Sales and also for recruiting.

LinkedIn Recruiter Lite has 21 filters.

linkedin recruiter lite filter

All of them are on Sales Navigator except 2:

  • Skills
  • Year of Graduation

You can easily bypass this lack with “Years of Experience” and “Keywords” filter.

Indeed, the Keyword filter will look for keywords in all the profile including the Skills section.

use keyword filter to find skills sales navigator

Same thing, you don’t need to know the year of graduation, if you know for how long the candidate is working using “Years of experience”.

use sales navigator filters for sourcing recruiters

Here is an example of a candidate sourcing that you can do with Sales Navigator.

To dive deeper on how to use Sales Navigator to find candidates like in Recruiter, you can watch this tutorial to learn more about filters and LinkedIn Sales Navigator Boolean search.

Step #2: Automate Candidate Sourcing With Saved Searches

Once you have finished tuning your Sales Navigator search filters, you can save your search so that you get notified every time a new candidate match the filters.

For that just click on “Save Search”:

sales navigator saved search to find new candidates

Once your search is saved, you can click on “Saved Searches” to access it.

automate candidate sourcing sales navigator

In the ‘New results’ column, you’ll find all the new candidates that match your filters.

Every week, LinkedIn will add new profiles matching your criteria that you can contact right away.

Step #3: Personalize Your Outreach

I’ve made an experiment recently by creating a fake Python developer profile on LinkedIn.

The number of messages and requests the profile receives per day is just insane.

personalize sourcing messages sales navigator

There is absolutely no way to standout without hyper-personalization. This is the key for successful LinkedIn outreach campaigns.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you personalize your messages by providing icebreaker ideas in the InMail inbox.

how to send messages to candidates on sales navigator

You get 50 InMail credits per month with Sales Navigator.

However, you can send unlimited InMails if you managed to identify Open Profiles.

Here’s a tutorial on how to do that:

Export Sales Navigator leads for free

You can also send a classic connection request to candidates, but take note that they are limited to 100 connection per week.

There are also some hacks to bypass this limit that you can find here:

If candidates don’t reply to InMails nor connection requests, you can try to get their emails to get a reply.

Here’s how to proceed.

Step #4: Export Candidates From Sales Navigator and find their Emails

One benefit of using Sales Navigator is that there are many plugins and extensions you can add to it (unlike Recruiter).

It’s really simple to create emails list from LinkedIn Sales Navigator searches and lists with Evaboot.

Export Sales Navigator leads for free

Step #1: Extract your search using Evaboot Chrome extension.

export candidates from sales navigator

Step #2: Once your extraction is completed, click on Find Emails to add the files in your CSV.

find candidates email from sales naviagtor

Step #3: Download your file.

email extracted from linkedin sales navigator.png

Evaboot will find and verify professional email addresses of candidates and add them at the right of the file.

Step #5: Find Open To Work Candidates on Sales Navigator

There is no “Open to Work” filter on Sales Navigator.

Honestly, do you want to pay $835/month just to have this filter?

There is a workaround if you use Sales Navigator + Evaboot

You won’t be able to filter on “Open to work”

But you will be able to find who is “Open to work” among the candidates you extracted.

detect open to work profile sales navigator

Congratulations. You now know how to find candidates with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

You can do much more than that with this tool.

Why don’t you also use it to find clients for your recruiting business?

How to Use Sales Navigator For Your Recruiting Business?

Sales Navigator is a wonderful LinkedIn prospecting tool if you are a recruiting business.

You can decide to target leads or accounts.

how to use sales navigator for recruiting business

If you are a recruiting business, you should use the account search.

Here’s why.

Step #1: Build a list of companies currently hiring on LinkedIn

There is a magic filter you can use: “Hiring on LinkedIn”

hiring filter sales navigator account search

This filter will show you all the companies that have currently one or more job offers opened on LinkedIn.

build lead list recruiting businesses

Then you can add other filters on top of that like:

  • Company Headcount
  • Growth Rate
  • Size of Departments
  • Department Growth
  • Location
  • Industry
  • And more…

This will give you the opportunity to build a really qualified list of accounts currently recruiting on LinkedIn. This is a super icebreaker for the messages you are going to send in your LinkedIn prospecting campaign.

Step #2: Save The Search To Be Notified When New Companies Start Hiring

You can save your account list to get notified every time a company post a job offer on LinkedIn.

save account search linkedin sales navigator

Every week, you will be notified of the new companies that have opened job offers on LinkedIn.

automate lead generation recruiting business

That is a great way to put your lead generation on autopilot as a recruiting business.

Step #3: Analyze Their Needs with Company Pages Insights

Once that you have identified a list of companies, you will get some insight about their recruiting needs on their company pages.

get insight clients sales navigator

To do this:

  • Go on the company page
  • Go on the insight section
  • Click on Job Openings
  • You will see how many job offers they have currently opened
  • And in which department they are hiring

Knowing exactly for which position they are hiring is gold.

If you use this information correctly in your LinkedIn sales prospecting messages, your reply rates will skyrocket.


You have identified the need of your prospect.

Now, let’s identify the right decision-makers to contact.

Step #4: Find the Decision-Makers

To find decision-makers to contact, you can use the Account Map present on the company page.

find decision makers linkedin sales navigator

If it’s a large company, you can filter Recommended Lead on Functions and selected Human Resources.

LinkedIn will show the decision-makers inside the HR Department.

If it’s a small company, you will see the C-Levels directly in the account map on the right. Often in the small companies, C-Levels will handle recruiting themselves.


Great. You have identified the right decision-makers.

Now, let’s see how to send a message that will 100% get a reply.

Step #5: Send Personalized Messages With Account Alerts

To maximize your chances of getting a reply, you need to send a personalize message.

For that, you can use the alert section of company pages.

use alerts to get icebreakers ideas

In this section, you will find all sorts of company updates:

  • LinkedIn posts shared by the company page
  • Mentions in the news
  • New Decision-makers

That is perfect material to think about a personalized icebreaker.

recruiting business lead generation with sales navigator

For example, here I see that they appeared on a TV Show recently.

Let’s mention that in the message.

It will show that I don’t come out of nowhere and I’ve made some research on them.

Example of a message you could send

Hey Sam,

Heard about Gener8 Ads through Dragon Den. C

Congrats on growing the company so fast this year!

I’ve seen you’re currently hiring 2 engineers.

Are the position field yet?

This message has a high chance of getting a reply because I precisely mention their need and add a really personalized icebreaker.

If you want to know more about how to get more appointments with LinkedIn, you can check this video:


That was the manual way to prospect as a recruiting business on LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Now, let’s see how to automate the process.

Step #6: Automate Your Lead Generation Process With Account Lists

If you don’t need to check every company page, there’s a simple process you can use to identify all the decision-makers in a list of company.

It’s called Account Based Searching.

The first step is to make an account search on LinkedIn to build an account list out of it.

build client list sales navigator recruiting

For that:

  1. Select companies using the tick boxes
  2. Click on “save to list”
  3. Create a list or the accounts into an existing list

After that:

  1. Go on the lead search
  2. Find the workflow filter
  3. Select the company list you have just built
  4. Add filters to find decision-makers

Boom.

find decision makers sales navigator recruiting

You have just created a super targeted list of decision-makers.

You can now export your lead list and find emails with Evaboot.

extract recruiting clients into csv

There you go.

You have now an Excel file with all information you need about your prospects and their emails.

You can decide to contact them manually, or to use an outreach tool to automate this process for you.

Step #8: Automate Your Outreach With a Prospecting Tool

There are tons of LinkedIn automation tools out there. I personally use LGM.

mutichannel prospectin recruiting

I like it because you can launch multichannel outreach sequences using:

  • LinkedIn
  • Email
  • Twitter

The interface is really simple and it allows you to simply visualize how your campaigns looks like.

personalize messages at scale

Like most prospecting tools, they allow you to add custom variable to your messages so you can personalize at scale.

Simply import your Evaboot file into LGM and you are good to go.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator VS Recruiter: What is the Best Option?

If you are a recruiting business, you should definitely go with Sales Navigator instead of LinkedIn Recruiter. Here’s why:

A Unique Tool to Find Candidates and Clients

LinkedIn Sales Navigator will allow you to find clients and candidates at the same time.

LinkedIn Recruiter only allows you to find candidates.

sales navigator vs linkedin recruiter

Plus, Sales Navigator is more efficient for finding candidates as it has more filters than Recruiter (29 vs 21 for Recruiter)

Sales Navigator is a Cheaper Alternative

There is huge difference between Sales Navigator cost and LinkedIn recruiter cost.

Here are the different pricing (monthly payment)

  • Sales Navigator: $99/month
  • Recruiter Lite: $160/month
  • Recruiter Corporate: $835/month

The ROI on Sales Navigator is 10 times higher as you can also use it for the sales operations of your recruiting business

Conclusion

You go it. If you know how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for recruiting, this tool will become your best friend.

The ROI you will get on it will be much higher than the one on LinkedIn Recruiter.

As a recruiting business, make the right choice and go with Sales Navigator.

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