I talk about AI a lot here. It’s exciting, it’s powerful. It’s useful. But today I want to take a step back and look at something foundational. Your PROJECTS. Understanding why and how to set up your project can set you up for success and help you to be efficient.

When you are looking for a candidate, you should create a Project. Why? Because a Project is an organizational space in Recruiter where you can search for candidates. It allows you to save all your work including your searches, in one central location. Working in projects makes it easy to track where your candidates are in the hiring process. Projects are also easy to share with your team members so you all can easily access everything you need in one place.

You can use Projects to work on current job openings, for building future pipelines of talent, or to track current employees for future openings within your organization. Every time you add a candidate to your pipeline, or hide a candidate from your project, you are helping Recruiter learn about they candidate you want to find. Recruiter will notice and alert you with a search alert when there are good candidates to review.

 Did you know? Candidates can be in more than one project at a time. You will see their status in each project on their profile card as you review. If someone is already in a final interview for something else you’re working on filling, it may not be a great time to ask them about the new job you are trying to fill.

 Go open Recruiter, choose a Project, and I’ll walk you through the different sections.

Overview Tab: The Project Overview tab is the first tab you’ll see when you open any project. It allows you to quickly gauge the health of any Project by scanning real-time metrics and efficiently address issues that need attention. There are several sections:

• Overview displays Activity and Recent collaborator activity over the period of time you choose. Click the All activity dropdown to select My activity only to see your activity on the Project. Click the Last 4 weeks dropdown to select a date range.
• About this project displays project details, permissions, project members, customized talent insights, skills, workplace type, and more
• InMail trends displays the number of InMails sent, avg. open rate, avg. response rate, accepted InMails, declined InMails, and no response InMails. Click the All collaborators dropdown to select My activity only. Click the Last 4 weeks dropdown to select a date range.
• Pipeline displays hiring pipeline stages activity in your project.
• Saved candidates demographics are metrics based on the information from candidates you have put into your pipeline. Top job titles, Years of experience, Locations, Top companies, Top skills and Diversity of saved candidates (gender) are the categories.  BTW, gender insights will only display if a project has 25+ candidates in the pipeline and 67%+ of those candidates have inferred gender data available.

Talent Pool Tab: When you create a project, Recruiter automatically runs a search integrated within the Talent pool tab of your project, based on the criteria you entered. From the Talent pool tab, you can easily search across the entire LinkedIn network and use AI-Assistance and/or filters to refine your search (more on that in other posts!). If you need to step away or start a different search, you can return to the Talent pool tab anytime and Recruiter will remember everything you’ve entered here and even what page you are on, so you can easily pick up where you left off with your search.

Pipeline Tab: When you save a profile to a project, the profile is added to the Pipeline tab of your project. Your pipeline consists of the candidates that you identified as meeting your search criteria and you are interested in following up with.

Here you can quickly see all candidates you are interested in, and see where they are within the recruiting process using the Active Stages in the left rail of Pipeline tab. The stages will vary, depending on the administrative settings within your Recruiter dashboard.

Project Settings Tab: The Project settings tab is where you can edit and manage all your project-level settings and details such as project name, description, job title, location, and seniority.

 Call to Action: if you have questions on any of this, or if you want advice on your projects, please come to a Live Q&A. My colleagues and I will be happy to strategize with you!