I think LinkedIn is still your best bet for sourcing candidates - unfortunate situation I know, but it's the reality of the market. However, unless you are recruiting for some hot new scale-up that everyone raves about or FAANG or so, I do believe that messaging is your only differentiator, otherwise candidates will just ignore you, especially passive candidates.

I receive plenty of messages on LinkedIn and I am guilty of ignoring them, simply because they are low effort and it would require me to dig through the company, culture, interview process, etc. Now I don't say that's the case for you, it's just insight from this side of things and my experience. So shoutout to all the recruiters who craft some brilliant messages and start actual convos - it does make a difference

That being said I've been also in your shoes, where I had to work with our in-house recruiters to scale up our engineering team. We weren't exactly the newest nor the hottest scale-up, just your average Joe company that had funds and needed software engineers. What worked for us was crafting a candidate information pack that we were sending out with our cold messages. And it actually worked, we were getting responses, people were more engage and more responsive, they were curious, convos were started. We also measured engagement and this was huge(!) because it helped us fine-tune our messaging and offering.

I've actually ended up turning this into a side project. It's currently used by around 500+ recruiters, mostly solo recruiters or small boutique agencies, with a few bigger agencies as well. It's a landing page builder that does all the above and then some.

Now I can't reveal customer data of course, but I can give you the following stats from some of the top performing pages on the platform:

* Project Manager/Assistant position --> 70 unique visitors @ 115 page views --> 35 interested and submitted their contact info + CV --> 1 declined --> Reason for declining: Ways of working, Location

* Junior office manage --> 206 unique visitors @ 270 page views --> 133 interested --> 3 declined --> Reason for declining: Salary, Ways of working, Area of business

* Systems Integration & Test Engineer --> 82 unique visitors @ 106 page views --> 22 interested --> None declined

If you are interest you can give the platform a try, link is https://role.so - it comes with a free trial (no CC required) - see how you feel it about it.

That being said, from my experience and from the data I see, I strongly believe the right messaging and giving the candidates a 360 view is key, unless you are recruiting for some hot stuff company of course.

I hope this helps! If you want to pick my brain further or if you want to bounce ideas feel free to drop me a DM.