Best Strategies for Finding Employees Online
Employers looking for people to hire are constantly searching the Internet’s many job search websites, job boards, and classified ads for qualified candidates. There’s no shortage of resource, especially if you’re looking for people with skills and experience related to your industry.
But long term and repeat use of searches—whether on Google, LinkedIn, Inside/Outside, or other job search sites… can become very intimidating. So can hopping from one job board to another. Not to mention the time and energy needed to write or edit your resume and cover letter, and so on.
That’s where search engines come in. When it comes to finding people, there’s no more comprehensive or efficient way of hunting for candidates than using a popular job search engine.
You’ll find thousands of job candidates searching the Web just like candidates looking for your organization are looking for jobs. These job seekers are looking for positions just like you’re looking for people to fill your open positions. While it’s true that search engines are mainly used for leisure while job seekers are likely more focused on jobs, they’re still capitalizing on the same content and that’s a goldmine of candidates.
Develop Your Company’s Online Presence
As today’s job market becomes more competitive, a strong online presence is a must for employers. Potential candidates can find your company’s website through a Google search, Facebook or Twitter. The bottom line is that these active online presences help prospects and employees find your company quickly. So having a quality website is a good first step to get a leg up on your competitors.
The good news is that you don’t have to hire a professional marketing or design firm to create an eye-catching and quality company website. With a little effort, you can get the job done yourself and build an online presence that attracts applicants and applications. Creating your company’s online presence is easy, just follow these steps.
Decide How Much to Spend – Creating a company website usually requires hiring a professional designer or developer to implement a design that’s simple and effective. The cost for a professional design varies, depending on the complexity and quality desired.
Sign Up on a Job Posting Site
Nowadays, there are many job posting websites including Monster, CareerBuilder, and SimplyHired. These job posting sites are free for everyone to post a job opening and they provide information on companies’ openings.
This can serve as a great alternative for employers with old fashioned way of recruiting. Just remember to specify whether you’re looking for full-time or part-time workers, and to be clear on hours and salaries.
Optimize Your Job Postings
Think your job postings don’t stand a chance? Think again! With so many websites, apps, articles and blogs regarding job searching, job seekers have better chances of finding an ideal job than employers find finding the right candidates to fill their positions. This means employers need to think creatively about how they advertise their openings, post useful information to help job seekers, and manage their job postings once they’re live.
Be Consistent
Have regular and predictable processes to make sure you’re hiring the right people. That way, you’ll be able to hold everyone to the same standards and set of expectations.
Set Up Clear Expectations: Communicate clearly and make sure that the hiring managers and candidates share the same expectations for the position, based on the description of the job opening and the qualifications for the position.
Conduct Interviews: Interview for skills and competencies that are directly correlated to the requirements of the position, rather than on subjective factors.
Ask Questions: Ask probing questions to assess your candidates’ skills and experience.
Be Fair: Don’t judge potential hires based on their biases or prejudices.
Take Notes: Make notes of anything that you feel is important, but that you would like to follow up with for reference, at a later date.
Be Investing In Your Relationship: It’s important to build a relationship while you recruit new members to your team.
Look Beyond Candidate’s Credentials: Do not rely on what is on a resume but ask rather what isn’t on the resume.
Get Them To Sell Themselves: Ask your candidates to sell themselves. You’ll likely notice that the people who do are the people who are worth interviewing.
Top Ways to Find Remote Employees
Shared knowledge helps foster a collaborative and inviting atmosphere in the workplace. This atmosphere encourages employee engagement, which is when your employees share ideas and build relationships with each other. When employees are engaged, they are happier, more productive and take pride in their work – something you’ll definitely want to foster in your remote workforce.
In order to find the fantastic employees that you’ll love to work with, you need to identify the traits and skills that key stakeholders value. Identifying these traits and seeing exhibits of their hidden qualities can give you a better idea of the employees you’ll want to hire.
Having an effective hiring process is key to finding the ideal employees for your remote team. Using these tips can help to streamline your current hiring processes along with keep them efficient and effective.
Define Impressionable Traits and Skills
As you develop your hiring process, try to establish what types of traits and qualities employees possess. The American Conference of Business owners and managers suggest that you identify and list these traits. Names alone can be misleading and can do more harm than good. Instead, list attributes such as personality, communication, emotional intelligence and even social skills.
Figure Out Traits and Skills Your Stakeholders Value
Choose the Right Job Boards
There are several job boards available to help companies with their recruiting efforts. Obviously, job boards have a fairly strong track record of getting the right people to the right jobs, and they can be a valuable tool for both large and small organizations.
But for every good recruitment tool, there’s one that’s even better. And for every one of those, there’s even better than that. So which is the best way to find job candidates you’ll enjoy working with? Think carefully.
Consider the following:
Are you a large or small organization? If you’re small, you’ll be more likely to hire someone who already knows someone who works for your company. If you’re a large organization, you’ll probably be looking for people with the best qualifications.
Does your organization have a specific industry focus? If you’re in retail, you might want to consider targeting candidates who are interested in a career in the retail industry. But this may not be relevant in certain industries, such as financial services, consulting, or IT.
Brag About Your Remote Culture
There comes a time in your company’s career that you need to do things differently. That typically means budget cuts and implementing new technological advances. Sometimes, however, it can also mean rebuilding your team from the ground up, recruiting young talent, and creating a culture that’s remote from the corporate office.
Remote employees benefit your recruiting efforts and often the company culture, because they’re not distracted by the stresses and pains of traditional office life. Interviewees have plenty of time to think about their profession and with little to no time constraints, they’ll be able to work extra hard.
In addition, telling your employees what you’re doing will help them inspire the rest of the team. When a new idea is mentioned, they will be the first to emulate it, and the rest of the team will follow.
Provide as Many Details as Possible
Let’s be honest, finding employees can be a real pain, right? Whether you’re hiring for your startup or a large company, you can’t exactly expect the process to be perfect and efficient like the internet would have you believe.
But most people who are looking for a job seriously underestimate the amount of information they should be providing to ensure their resumes make it through the pile. Try to provide as much detailed information as possible, and be sure to include:
- Full Name
- High School
- CURRENT city/location
- Age range (21 and under, 21-30, 31-40, or 41 and above)
- Skills and abilities
- Education and work experience
- A summary of your skills and abilities
You’re going to have to trust your applicant skills a little here, but be as specific as possible, and you’ll be sure to create a resume that stands out in a stack.
Stay Competitive
Although the national unemployment rate has recently dropped to 7.3 percent, it’s still high and higher than it was before the recession. That being said, hiring is still challenging. The good news is that there are a number of ways you can remain competitive when recruiting new talent.
Here are 15 surefire ways to find employees you’ll love.
Compete on Price
If your salaries are greater than the competition, you’ll likely find the best employees. That’s why they say that the highest paid person gets the job.
Although some will debate the effectiveness of this strategy, others will argue that paying employees based on performance can destroy morale. Employees who feel undervalued can be difficult to retain. If you can find good employees at a low cost, then you have a great advantage.
Be a Maverick
What is a maverick? It’s a person who breaks rules or breaks the mold. The phrase –be a maverick” was popularized by Silicon Valley venture capitalists who urged startup companies to try new ideas, experiment, and follow their intuition rather than conventional wisdom.
If you break out of the mold and do things differently, you’ll likely be rewarded with better performance.
Tips for Finding Hourly Employees
When it comes to hiring hourly employees, company owners and managers can’t get by just doing a good job of screening job candidates in to find the right person. They should also pay attention to how to find the right employees who will make nearly every interactions with the company easier.
Here are some tips that can help you hire hourly employees you’ll love!
Create a culture of communication.
Suppose you hire a great crop of candidates who believe in your mission and backgrounds that are perfect for your company. Who do you think will be more valuable to your company? The candidate who is perfectly qualified for the job they have and is excited to be working for you or the candidate who has some personality trait or background that don’t work for your company and helps you to get a better feel for how they’ll fit into your company culture. For example, if your company is based on community involvement, and you want to hire a candidate who has been a leader in several youth soccer leagues or a group that has volunteered for a local animal shelter.
Communicate clear expectations.
Smart employers will make sure their employees understand the scope of their responsibility so they will know what they are getting into. It is also important that you communicate clear expectations.
Try a Staffing Agency
Every business needs employees, and hiring employees can be a challenge. Your employees need to be trained, hired, supervised, and fired. Even if you have a lot of available positions, it can be challenging to find and hire people who have the skills you need … and who will love coming to work every day.
One way to find these employees is to use a staffing agency, which finds and sources associates for a business. Hiring an agency gives you access to a large pool of potential employees from which you can select from.
Retaining your staff is equally as important as finding great employees. Staying competitive in the market is a full-time job. Using a staffing agency can help you maintain your current staff by allowing you to focus on the hundreds or thousands of available options for hiring. You can find out here if a staffing agency is right for you.
Advertise Locally
If you run a shop that sells handmade crafts that focus on empowering and honoring women and sell products such as twine, jewerly, and paper products (like cards, invites, bags, and trivets), you can use local listings withGoogle Adwords to reach those who are seriously interested in your brand and may be looking to purchase something. If you run a general business, hiring and market research is important to determine which positions and departments tend to produce the most profits. Find out what the trends are in terms of what workers in each department do during their day-to-day business. In either case, by hiring locally, you’ll have a better idea of your customer profile and the type of people whose skills you need to hire.
Use Yelp as a Recommending and Feedback Tool
"Yelp is a word of mouth recommendation tool that allows customers to review local business from the perspective of the consumer," according to Yelp co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman. Making Yelp part of your hiring strategy will help you build up your brand and find the very best candidates.
Build Relationships With Local Universities
Showing interest in your employees’ education and how they can help you field new ideas can go a long way in showing you value their brainpower. This is done by having frequent contact with local universities. Attending some of the events they have at the school will show you’ve started a relationship and you’re ready to lend some advice or assistance.
Boost Your Productivity and Reduce Replacements
Training is a sure sign that the company is invested in the development of their employees. Not only will this help the company achieve a functional product or service but it will increase productivity which will in turn reduce training costs and replacements due to depleted employee pools.
Better Opportunities for Your Employees and Workforce
Your employees become skilled or knowledgeable personnel and can help other employees gain valuable knowledge. They are better able to market their skills to other companies as well as prepare for new job opportunities or internships.
Above All, They Are Homework.
The important point to remember when looking for employees is that they don’t need someone to walk them from point A to point B. They have to be able to operate independently; not someone who is accustomed to a handout.
Quickest Ways to Find Replacement Employees
If you are in the business of hiring new employees, it’s crucial that you know what to look for. Before you start running ads, take a few seconds to learn about 15 quick ways to find replacement employees. Knowing these traits of employees that will make great employees will also give you an advantage over potential candidates and colleagues in your workplace.
If you deal with employee retention at all, you may already know that the biggest complaint from employees is – not enough hours.‘ You must do your best to make sure that your employees all receive enough hours, but talking to your employees is one of the quickest ways to find a replacement.
Here are the three best ways to talk to current employees to find prospective replacements:
Ask the best employees who the best employees are and who they work well with. Start by asking each of these employees what the best job skills are. If they can’t answer that question, ask them what they like and dislike about the job. Next, ask these employees if they would encourage anyone to work for you.
Choose an Efficient Applicant Tracking System (ATS)
To increase the efficiency of your applicant tracking system (ATS), use a program that will make your job easier and cutting down the length of time you’ll spend sorting through applications.
An applicant tracking system can help you eliminate stack and file applications. Instead of combing through stacks of paper, you can have the ATS scan your applications electronically.
Some ATSs can also help you to speed up the application process by eliminating redundant information. For example, applicants may have between 5-10 years of experience. If you’re still asking for previous work experience, you’ll need to ask the same questions for each applicant. If you’re using an ATS, you can automatically handle these redundant questions and get the correct information.
Network, Network, Network
Be the first person to introduce people to each other.If you refer someone, they will be more likely to refer you.A referral is the most effective form of advertising because it’s word of mouth, and people trust referrals more than advertisements.
Go to hiring events and network.Join hiring events in your area.They’re usually open to the public.The more people you meet, the more doors you’ll open.
Identify job trends in your industry and approach your acquaintances about opportunities.Local paper classified ads, job fairs, industry recruiting events and networking groups are great places to find job and internship openings.
Tap into your professional network and see if your network will refer you.This could include your alumni group, professional associations and your social media network.
Look for opportunities on college campuses.Starting today, high schoolers and college students are beginning to register for internships.
Visit and check out your local career center.These centers will have a wealth of resources.Your local career center can help you find job and internship opportunities.
Ask your friends and colleagues for help.They can introduce you to the right people or offer you advice on finding a home.
Ask for Referrals
Looking for employees is never easy. But if you tap into the influence of your existing staff, you could easily find some new ones. Ask for referrals, and ask carefully!
Give everyone the chance to recommend an applicant who went through some of the same training as you, and to give their evaluations on how the candidates did.
Not only are you showing support for your staff, you’ll also get candid and honest feedback from people you trust. Give them the chance to share candidates whom they admired and may have worked well with. This is a win-win.
Request Applicant Feedback
If you’re planning to interview applicants or candidates for a job, shadowing them, reviewing their resume or applications, or meeting with them in an interview, consider requesting that they provide you with some feedback on their interview experience.
Providing candidates with an easy way to give feedback on an experience they’ve already had will allow you to both welcome candidates back for future interviews, and provide them with an excellent tool for career development.
And most importantly, they’ll be happy to keep coming back to you.
Your company’s culture and professionalism will be underscored when you do this. The reports show a remarkable 10.3% improvement in employee retention rates.
Do any of your employees or candidates ask you for career advice? If you’re not sure, invite them to ask you for advice, and then ask them for feedback.
The Survey Found that Feedback Has a Positive Effect on Employee Morale (…)
But that’s not the only benefit. Let’s look at what else you’ll get:
Bottom Line
Finding qualified applicants to fill your open positions can be a challenge. Your resume and cover letter alone don’t guarantee a call back. For some jobs, your interviews may be the only time you’ll spend with a candidate. So you have to carefully craft your interview questions to find the right fit.
Have a few ground rules from the start. First, make sure that questions you ask are easily answered with a yes or a no. Questions that include too many variables or are open ended tend to cause candidates to hem and haw. Second, determine the best time to ask your questions. Before a job offer is made lets you focus on being quiet and to the point. Later, if you’ve already shortlisted candidates and are finalizing the selection process, you can have an open ended conversation.
Here are 15 surefire ways to find employees you’ll love.