The Best Places to Recruit

The Best Places To Recruit

The best overall strategy for recruiting is to always be networking. The more people you know, the more potential employees you meet. But underneath this overarching strategy are of course a few techniques we have discovered over the years that will help you unearth some particularly great candidates.

LinkedIn

This is a source we speak about frequently because it has been delivered to us time and again. The site allows you to search by geography and keyword, so you could, for example search for “WordPress developers in Romania.” Once you’ve pulled up those results you can search through to find candidates who are great matches for you. Then we use an indirect method. WE send an email to this person praising their particular software knowledge and experience and send them one of your job postings asking: “Do you know anyone who would be good for this job?” You are now looking at one of two outcomes, both of them good:

1.) The person has a few friends who might be good matches but who didn’t appear on your search. Great! More possibilities for the database if they don’t end up being good fits.

2.) The person says, “Hey! I might be a good fit for this.” You’ve gotten them engaged and interested in the position without directly approaching.

More and more people will discover how useful LinkedIn as time goes on but at the moment it’s still an excellent tool to find great candidates.

Upwork

A site that has been widely discovered is Up-work and similar “gig” oriented sites. As a result, hundreds and sometimes thousands of people apply for jobs you might post there, leaving you drowning in applications and nowhere closer to finding the right person. What we recommend instead is to start by posting a private job – this means that the candidate has to have been personally invited by you to apply.

Then, when you go through possible candidates that you would like to apply to, look for those who have only had 1 or 2 jobs on the site. Many people come to sites like Upwork hoping to find some work, but they end up getting discouraged as many ends up applying for the same jobs they do and they can’t seem to get a break. By targeting these individuals, you will be sure to find people who are hungry and eager to apply, particularly when they know they will be applying to a private job instead of one open to every single person who has a login to the website.

Your Team

We believe, by and large, that the best candidates are already employed somewhere else. But you may have an offer that they can’t refuse: perhaps it’s a higher salary, more work in an area they love, or a possible relocation. Every single time that you put a job out, you should make sure your team knows about it. You can offer some kind of referral bonus as an additional motivation, but it’s very likely that someone on your team may know a good candidate for a job, and indeed, if you’ve taken our tip to profile your top 10-15% of performers, you may even have pools (schools attended, former companies worked at) to routinely dip into when posting jobs.

In the beginning of the article, we noted that the more people you know, the more potential candidates you meet. If you use even one of the techniques we’ve discussed above, you will be adding more quality candidates into your hiring funnel, and the more candidates you add, the likelier you are to find someone who’s a great fit.