There's a counterintuitive downside to asking recruiters to find your next employee

Finding and hiring the perfect candidate for a job can take months, but there's a simple step that could make the process much more effective:

Send your initial recruitment message from a manager, not a recruiter.

LinkedIn conducted a survey of 14,000 professionals around the world to determine the universal elements of a successful talent recruitment effort. The report, titled "Inside the Mind of Today's Candidate," has 13 key findings, including the risk you run by having a recruiter reach out to a candidate.

It's not that recruiters do worse at finding the ideal candidate than a hiring manager for the role would, it's that candidates feel more flattered when it's the manager who makes first contact with them.

LinkedIn found that 56% of those surveyed were more likely to positively respond to a recruitment message if it came from a hiring manager rather than recruiter. Those surveyed said that they perceived the manager as having more authority, and were less likely to consider the message part of a mass outreach to quickly fill a job opening.

Other findings include:

• Most applicants turn to a company's website for job postings (53%), with LinkedIn postings coming in second (38%).

• Candidates most want the outreach message to contain a detailed job description (89%), and strongly prefer to have a salary range included (72%).

• About half of those surveyed said they follow corporate accounts on social media to track job listings.

• The majority of applicants (65%) do research for their job interview on the company's website. LinkedIn found that it works in the company's favor to be transparent about the interview process rather than filling it with surprises, so that you can see candidates at their best. It praised the way Google and McKinsey provide this resource.

• Candidates are comfortable with three job interviews, but start to be turned off past that number.

• The top three things candidates want before given a job offer are a conversation with someone on the leadership team, prompt follow-ups, and a sense of how they performed in an interview.

• A bad job interview on the manager's part can cause an applicant to lose interest, according to most applicants (65%).

You can download the full report at LinkedIn »