Business is booming—your small company is growing, and it’s time to onboard more help. The only problem: you’re not sure how to find the right employees to fill the roles you need. From using free, DIY classifieds to soliciting your professional network for referrals to asking an extended family member for a little help, there seems to be endless possibilities as to where you can scout and find employees.
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You need to know how these sources differ in order to be successful at finding quality applicants wherever you choose to seek out employees. If you’re not sure of the best places to look for your next quality hire, then keep reading for some insightful advice and tips.
Use LinkedIn
LinkedIn® is the social media preference of business professionals. Even if you don’t have any positions that you are currently hiring for, maintaining an active profile on LinkedIn allows you to keep in contact with former friends and colleagues.
What to do on LinkedIn:
- Congratulate others on their career accomplishments. This is a genuine way to stay in touch as well as acknowledge career successes.
- Post regular content about your own industry or updates regarding your business’s news. Should any employment opportunities arise in the future, they’ll be the first to know.
- Create a specific account for your small business only. Here you can post company updates, accomplishments, and company culture without the interruption of personal posts.
- Keep an active and healthy profile. This will enable those interested and potential candidates to get a sneak peak of what your small business is all about at a quick glance.
If you need to search for candidates, then you can do so by entering keywords in LinkedIn’s search bar. Additionally, by creating a keyword-rich profile for your company, active jobseekers can use the same search tool to find your business.
Consider paying a small fee to advertise your open positions to LinkedIn. Paying to post can help place your listing in front of a wider pool of qualified candidates; LinkedIn will promote your listing on homepages of who appears to be the most qualified audience and feature it within their job board. You’ll also gain access to Inmail, with the option to contact people outside of your network. This tactic may increase your company’s online visibility and could help you find employees more quickly.
Incentivize Employees to Refer New Talent
Your small business might just have an untapped network of referrals waiting to be discovered. Incentivizing your existing staff to refer new talent and find employees can be incredibly effective. For starters, by leveraging in-house referrals you might avoid having to hire an outside recruiter.
Your employees will be eager to provide you with solid recommendations. Not only will an incentive in the form of a bonus or seniority motivate them, but it could also instill a sense of responsibility and investment in your business because they contributed to bringing on a new member of the team.
Whoever your employees recommend will likely be extra motivated to work hard for you, considering the pressure they might feel to live up to their expectations.
A final word on incentives. You don’t need to be extravagant—pick something that has meaning as well as falls within your company’s means. Regardless of what incentives you do use, implementing a referral program, you’ll introduce another way potentially to receive a steady stream of applicants that can make finding employees much easier.
Recruit Using Social Media
Social media could be a recruiting goldmine for your company, especially if you’re looking for young professionals to add to your team.
Similar to LinkedIn, promoting job listings on social media sites like Facebook®, Twitter®, and Instagram® could help your open position gain a lot of attention—especially if your post gets shared.
Before you publicize your job listing on social media, make sure you’ve built a solid profile.
- Gain a following on your page to lend credibility to your business.
- Post relevant content frequently that promotes your companies expertise, mission and culture. Don’t be afraid to show off that your business is a great place to work!
If your social media posts illustrate that you are an attractive company to work for, then passive job seekers might get curious and excited when they stumble upon your job post.
Use Online Job Posting Sites and Boards
Thanks to the growing number of online job websites, many employers are finding more and more new employees this way.
While online job posting sites offer plenty of upside in terms of scaling your efforts to find the best possible applicants, there are downsides. In order to make this investment pay off, employers need to make sure they have a complete understanding of who their ideal candidate is prior to investing in an online advertisement.
Let’s take a look and discuss some of your online job site options:
- Glassdoor®: This site is attractive because it encourages past and current employees to give feedback regarding their employment at a company. Pending that these reviews are good, potential candidates may be impressed by the discussions surrounding salary, benefits, workplace atmosphere, and more —making them more likely to apply.
- Indeed®: Indeed is a good option due to the sheer volume of applicants to which you’re given access. This job site is an aggregator, and pulls job listings from many different job boards which helps you reach over 200 million job seekers. With those large numbers, it suggests that it could be a good website to find a new, qualified employee for your open position.
- Industry®: Need candidates with experience in your particular line of work? This site might be a great option that focuses on your search parameters and can help you save a ton of time.
Let Job Seekers Come to You
Don’t do all the hard work yourself—attract great hires with a thoughtful company careers page. Adding this specific section to your website isn’t too difficult and can be a great way to find employees. Be sure to make it easy to find so that people can browse your open jobs.
As you make tweaks to your website, remember to address the following:
- Description of available positions
- Description of company culture
- Current employee testimonials
- Instructions on how to apply and a working link if applicable
- Updated FAQ section
Just like your social media profile, you want your careers page to highlight the ways that your company is a great place to work. It could be a good idea to build out your services section as well as your “About Us” page so your potential candidate can get a better feel for what your company does, who you are, and what you offer.
You might need to hire a web developer to create a polished and impressive site, but it may be well worth it, as all of this information will be accessible to your customers, too.
Stay In Contact With Good Candidates You Don’t Hire
As you go through interviews, you might be torn when it comes time to make a decision about a potential hire. If you have trouble choosing one candidate over the other, then be sure to not burn any bridges—if you need to hire again in the future, then your runner-up might still be available for hire if they are still interested in the position.
Always follow proper post-interview etiquette and save resumes in case there is a future need. If you don’t hire the candidate but you thought that they could be a fit on your team, then reach out to let them know about your potential interest in the future. If you’re genuine and respectful, then you might be able to find employees quickly by circling back to past, well-qualified candidates.
Connect. Screen. Hire.
No matter where you find employees, it’s always good practice to perform pre-employment screening. Gleaning insight into a candidate’s background can help inspire confidence in your next hire and help prevent you from making the wrong one.
ShareAble® For Hires puts small businesses in the driver’s seat to accelerate the employee screening process so you can expedite hiring your staff. Unlike some other screening solutions, ShareAble for Hires puts you on the fast track to make informed hiring decisions quickly with no hassles. It is the only screening tool designed to be available for use for 100% of small businesses.
It gives a small business an easy way to conduct online background checks and do it quickly. There’s no waiting to sign up or need to call in to establish an account. Signup to transaction can take as little as minutes to complete.
Screening is all online, available 24/7, and accessible from any device. By delivering near-instant background information, ShareAble enables employers to verify their applicant’s background quickly and confidently so they can focus on running their business.
The SMB gets critical information that they need to make a more informed decision. The job applicant gets a way to share important information quickly all the while explicitly consenting to screening. That means they share their sensitive data with whom they want when they want.
Trust is a 2-way street and ShareAble For Hires helps both the SMB and job applicant ultimately to gain trust in the moment with our reports, sent directly from TransUnion to both the business and the freelancer.
ShareAble For Hires offers online employment background checks for small business owners looking to safeguard the success of their company’s future. In addition to reviewing any relevant criminal history, it enables you to run an employment credit check and verify candidate identity… all in a matter of minutes.
With our simple online screening solution, you:
- Receive legal and compliant reports within minutes
- Gain insight into your job candidate’s criminal and financial history
- Screen on-demand, without needing a membership or subscription
If you’re on a search for high-quality employees, then make ShareAble For Hires part of your recruitment process and hire with confidence.
