How To Find Candidates On LinkedIn in 2025: A Complete Guide From Snov.io

TL;DR:

• You can use free or paid methods for LinkedIn’s headhunting.
• Use Boolean search filters for a more precise lookup.
• LinkedIn Recruiter, LinkedIn Recruiter Lite, and even Sales Navigator provide you with more advanced options for efficient talent search.
• Automate your LinkedIn search without compromising personalization with such outreach boosting tools as Snov.io.

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Boasting over 1 billion users, LinkedIn is one of the best solutions for talent search these days. And you don’t always need a paid subscription on the platform to attract the right professionals. 

In this guide, you’ll learn how to find candidates on LinkedIn using both free and premium accounts. We’ll share some working techniques and unveil how to make your sourcing easier with smart automation.

How do recruiters use LinkedIn to find candidates?

Just like lead generation on LinkedIn, candidate sourcing can be active or passive. 

Active recruiting means you’re actively headhunting by yourself: looking for candidates that fit open vacancies, contacting them directly, and offering to discuss a job opening.

Passive recruiting is more about posting jobs and receiving applications from those who are interested in getting a position.

Besides, LinkedIn offers both free and paid options for finding the best talent. It all depends on your goals, budget, or preferences.

In this article, we’ll focus on active candidate sourcing, touching upon free as well as advanced methods of headhunting. 

How to search for candidates on LinkedIn for free: best methods and hacks

What’s absolutely great about LinkedIn is that it allows talent sourcing without spending a dime. But here you should learn the ways of doing a basic search smartly. Here are some tips that will help you find the right candidates using LinkedIn’s free filters:

1. Search by #opentowork hashtag

This is the simplest way to find people looking for a job on LinkedIn. Yet it may be rather challenging as it requires looking into each profile separately, finding out whether they fit the vacancy.

2. Go through relevant companies and groups

LinkedIn has lots of groups and company pages that unite professionals who are open to work. You can follow these pages to see what contacts post on LinkedIn about their job preferences and desired positions.

Besides, you can join the communities that are relevant to your industry, look through their member lists, and check out publications to find the right people for specific positions.

3. Look up by job position

That’s the most precise way of looking for potential candidates whose experience and skills fit a position. All you have to do is enter a keyword related to the target position and filter people by location, company, industry, etc., depending on your needs.

Narrow down your global search to profiles that may be interested in getting a job at the moment with the following hacks:

Hack #1. Hunt for the “open to work” labeled profiles 

Look through the search list, paying attention to green banners on profile pictures. Contacting these people may bring you more positive results:

Keep in mind: Not everyone uses the “open to work” banner while being actually ready for job offers. So, we recommend also checking what stands below people’s LinkedIn logo and picture: look through profile headlines and About sections for phrases like “open to opportunities.” 

Hack #2. Switch LinkedIn People search to Services filter

There may be some professionals who are currently providing services related to a job position you’re offering. They may be potentially interested in your job opening. As soon as you type in a job position, filter the search results by Services and check out the profiles on a list. Apparently, there will be many profiles with “open to work” banners among the results:

4. Make the most of Boolean search

This method allows for a more precise lookup by combining keywords and operators like AND, OR, and NOT. A Boolean algorithm isn’t overall difficult:

• Use AND when both terms must appear: e.g., Java AND Spring
• Use OR for variations: e.g., HR OR recruiter
• Use NOT to filter out what you don’t want: e.g., developer NOT junior

Put the keyword in quotes so LinkedIn looks for an exact phrase: e.g., “social media.” Without quotes, LinkedIn treats words separately and may find irrelevant profiles with either “social” or “media” in job descriptions.

Let’s say you’re looking for a candidate who has experience in social media or content marketing, but don’t want LinkedIn to include product marketing in the results. In this case, your Boolean string should look like this: marketing AND (content OR “social media”) NOT product.

Our recommendation: While doing a Boolean search, combine a job title and an “open to work” keyword with the AND operator, e.g., “sales representative” AND “open to work”. This lets you find profiles of people interested in getting a job.

As you can see, finding candidates on LinkedIn is not a big deal. Just use the right keywords and mix them in a smart way to narrow down search results.

How to find talent on LinkedIn using paid methods

LinkedIn’s paid tools help you find candidates faster, optimizing your search strategies. By offering advanced search filters, higher InMail limits, and additional insights, they let you hire at scale or hunt for highly specific job roles.

LinkedIn offers the following paid hiring tools:

• LinkedIn Recruiter Lite
• LinkedIn Recruiter
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Yes, this may sound counterintuitive, but Sales Navigator can also help recruiters find potential candidates on LinkedIn and contact them through InMail. We’ll discuss it in more detail below.

Disclaimer: We won’t include LinkedIn pricing information in the article as it changes rather often. Visit the respective LinkedIn pricing pages or contact sales to find out how much every plan costs.

LinkedIn Recruiter Lite

Best for: individual recruiters or small teams

Recruiter Lite provides you with candidate recommendations, access to 30 InMails* per month, 20+ advanced search filters, team collaboration possibilities, and basic analytics on your outreach performance.

* InMail is a LinkedIn message you can send to users you’re not connected with.

Here’s how you can use LinkedIn Recruiter Lite for finding top talent:

• Start by entering a keyword, job title, or a Boolean string in the search bar.
  

Use advanced search filters (location, industry, company size, years in role, etc.) for a more specific lookup:

Once you identify a strong candidate, you can send them a personalized InMail directly, even if you’re not connected.

This tool also shares information about the talent pool within the job position you’re looking for. You can use these insights to refine your search, enriching the job description with additional specific requirements.

LinkedIn Recruiter

Best for: large teams involved in high-volume hiring

LinkedIn Recruiter is the most powerful solution for headhunting on the platform. It includes even more sophisticated features than its Lite counterpart. 

For example, with this plan, you can get 40+ search filters, 150 InMails/month, unlimited candidate profile views, and even #OpenToWork spotlight that lets you find the job-interested by hashtag. On top of that, LinkedIn Recruiter lets you integrate an ATS platform (if your team has any) so that all candidate information is kept in one place. 

LinkedIn Recruiter search is a perfect solution for recruiters who are hiring for multiple roles, coordinating with other team members, or managing hiring tasks across departments.

To look for candidates in Recruiter:

• Use an advanced Boolean approach applying filters like skills, job function, or seniority.
• Create projects for each role you’re hiring for and collaborate with your team for better progress tracking.
• Tap into “Recommended Matches” that LinkedIn suggests based on your job descriptions.
• Use tags and notes to organize the headhunted around shared projects.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Best for: solo recruiters looking for solutions at a lower price

Though originally designed for lead generation on LinkedIn, Sales Navigator also works well for recruiters on a tighter budget. They usually don’t need advanced hiring features, focusing more on extended search or outreach opportunities. This plan offers 50 InMails per month, advanced filters, and team collaboration features.

Looking up potential employees on LinkedIn Sales Navigator is easy:

• Do a search using Boolean strings that include the “open to work” keyword combined with filters like geography, job title, or company size.
• Use the “Leads” or “Accounts” features to build prospect lists (A hint: you can treat them as candidate lists).
• Save profiles and send InMails directly.

How to automate LinkedIn candidate search: tips and solutions from Snov.io

Even if you’ve found your best way to search for talent on LinkedIn, either free or paid, you might still spend hours sending them messages one by one. Then do it all over again the next day. And the day after that. 

Before you burn out, a bright idea may come to your mind: What if I try automation?

As a recruiter, you can automate the way you find and engage with candidates, freeing up your calendar from tiresome routine tasks. 

In this chapter, I recommend we take a closer look at how you can streamline your hiring work on LinkedIn and how Snov.io can save you time, making you fall in love with your job like never before. 

Find and save your candidate’s data

You already know how to use LinkedIn filters to search for candidates that match your requirements. But what’s next? Will you open every profile, copy the URL, and paste it into a Google Doc? Even the thought of handling all these tasks is exhausting.

Fortunately, there are special tools that let you look up and save your top talent in one place. For example, with one click of Snov.io’s LinkedIn Email Finder extension, you can collect top talent from LinkedIn profiles, search, and company pages, gathering their contacts into neat lists.

Snov.io welcomes you to create candidate lists absolutely for free, keeping all contact information of your potential employees verified.

Build automated outreach campaigns

Now that you’ve got a list of potential hires, you can set up an automated LinkedIn sequence, so all your communications with them are run on autopilot. 

Snov.io simplifies your routine here as well. Our LinkedIn Automation Tool will view candidate profiles, like their posts (if any), send connection requests, messages, and InMails on your behalf.

More so, with Snov.io, you can go beyond LinkedIn and use email for multi-channel follow-ups. By going multichannel, you’ll have more chances of reaching top talent and hunting them for an open job position.

Think of Snov.io as your LinkedIn wingman. You tell it who to talk to, and it gets their attention in a smart and, what’s important, safe way. This tool mimics human behavior, operates within LinkedIn’s usage limits, and provides location-based proxies to reduce the risk of account bans.

Share your calendar and get more interviews

Getting a “Yes, let’s talk” response is great. But you don’t want to risk losing your candidate to another recruiter just because they follow up faster than you.

Why not reduce the time between their “yes” and the actual interview? Thanks to Snov.io and Calendly integration, you can share your available interview slots in messages so potential employees will be able to book a meeting right away. 

Just add the respective Calendly link to your LinkedIn messages or emails and let them pick a time that works.

Want to go further? Add a condition to your campaign:

• If the meeting is booked, send a quick “Looking forward to our chat” message
• If not, follow up automatically.

Save all steps of your recruitment process in one place

Your recruitment is going so well, you can’t keep all the names in that one Google Doc anymore? It’s time to level up! 

With Snov.io, you can track every step of your hiring process. Simply adapt our free CRM to your hiring needs as I did:

With this CRM, you can easily adjust all stages of the hiring process to your goals, move them as you wish, and share valuable notes with your team.

Wrapping up

The success of your recruiting on LinkedIn depends on three things: how well you search, how clearly you reach out, and how consistently you follow up. 

Here’s what to focus on:

• Use Boolean operators and filters
• Upgrade to a paid plan for more advanced lookup options
• Automate repetitive tasks and stay focused on people, not routine activities.

Want to save time on sourcing and outreach? Create your free Snov.io account and use it for hiring top talent on LinkedIn!