If you’re not looking for candidates in the right places, you’re missing out on enormous pools of potential resources. In fact, it’s quite possible that your best potential hires are going to your competitors instead of you. It’s extremely important to know where to look for the best candidates, and oftentimes this means going to candidates rather than waiting to have them come to you.
Let’s explore a few strategies that will help you focus your talent search. We want to discuss four major strategies that can vastly improve your employee-seeking process.
Create an employee referral program.
Consider this: If you have employees at your company who have college degrees, they probably have a wide network of friends who have similar degrees. Likewise, if your employees attend a lot of career-related events, they probably know a lot of people in their field.
However, keep in mind that your employees probably aren’t spending a lot of time thinking about whether the people they know would be a good fit for your organization – most normal folks don’t really think this way. If you want to turn these secondhand networks into firsthand networks, you’ll need to encourage your current employees to start thinking in these terms.
The best place to start is by creating a lucrative employee referral program. If a referred hire ends up staying with your company for at least a year, the employee who made the referral should get a reward, and that reward should be extremely generous.
Just think of all the money you save by hiring through your employees. You’re likely to get better-quality candidates, and you won’t have to advertise your job listings or spend time dealing with stacks of resumes submitted by people that no one in your organization can vouch for. Some of the money you save should be handed back to the employee who made the referral – we think $1,000 is a good place to start as a one-year referral bonus, though that number should increase based on the salary of the person making the referral. It sounds like a lot, but $1,000 is pretty insubstantial compared to the amount of money (and headaches) you’ll save.
Get your employees talking about referrals. Make them excited about finding your next top-tier candidate. By doing so, you’re able to find candidates much faster, and behind every one of those candidates is a trusted employee who can vouch for them.
Create robust educational and networking opportunities for your team members.
To piggyback on the previous post, you should be encouraging your employees to attend industry events and to seek continuing education. In fact, you should offer to pay for these things if you can. Not only does this create learning opportunities that nurture the talent you already have in your organization, but it expands your hiring network as well.
Note that this should be done in tandem with a good referral program. When your employees are attending industry events and meeting people who are interested in and qualified to be working in your industry, your referral program should encourage them to become talent scouts at these events.
Not only are industry meetup events good places to learn, they’re great places to network and to find potentially untapped talent pools.
Use LinkedIn frequently and efficiently.
Like any social network, there are tricks to using LinkedIn effectively. You don’t want to just create a profile and hope it attracts people; you need to manage that account with some finesse, and with a good strategy in mind.
Here are some quick tips:
Create a strong brand identity. Make sure your brand stands out and is easy to find and recognize.
Be active. Don’t just upload a logo and a brief description and call it a day. You should be actively posting on LinkedIn to get the attention of other people in your industry.
Know what tools LinkedIn offers, and strategize how to use them to expand your reach.
Hire a social media manager if you can. Navigating social media can be a full-time job, and that’s why the social media manager position exists. The good news is that a full-time social media manager can also handle your other social media accounts, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. If you’re struggling to stay relevant on social media, you need to hire someone to help you out as soon as you can.
We’ve provided four simple tips to get you started, though it’s actually a pretty deep topic. If you want to delve deeper, LinkedIn has a useful guide on using their platform effectively.
Use a staffing agency
If time and resources are limiting factors for your talent search, you should definitely be handing those responsibilities over to a staffing agency like Staffing Proxy. Not only do staffing agencies make recruitment their primary focus, but they oftentimes provide additional resources, such as premium HR tools. Plus, they’re constantly expanding their networks and tapping into new talent pools.
Staffing agencies are an incredibly valuable tool that shouldn’t be overlooked. If you’re struggling at all to find top talent, you should be reaching out to the people who specialize in that exact thing.
Conclusion
Finding good candidates comes down to one primary factor: networking. Whether that’s digital networking via social media or in-person networking via industry events, you need to be actively focused on this part of the recruitment process.
If you can’t afford to commit to it yourself, then you absolutely need to find someone who can immediately. The future of your organization depends on it.
