Starting your own business is like a dream come true for many people. No more 9 to 5 schedule – you’ll have a flexible schedule, and you will not have a boss anymore to tell you what it is that you should do. You will be your own boss, and you will be the one to find and connect with your clients. You will have no one to answer to but yourself.
Now that you are no longer hired in someone’s service, there is one thing that you will have to do: hire someone in your service. After all, you can’t possibly do all that work yourself – particularly when you are planning on going large scale. You’ll need help – and for that, you’ll need employees now.
But where can you find that help? Can you do it online, or do you have to do it the old-fashioned way? If you are looking for them online, then what are the best websites to find employees? It might seem like it’s a pretty cumbersome task – but if you know exactly where to look, it is actually very simple. And most importantly, it won’t cost you a dime.
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Make Use of Free Boards
For many people, the word “free” may just sound too good to be true. After all, what good company would provide their services for free, without charging anything? However, this does not apply to job boards.
Certain websites such as Glassdoor or Indeed find employees let you advertise your job free of charge. All you need to do is to create an ad in which you describe the job and post it on these platforms. The next thing you know, you will be receiving resume after resume from the people that are qualified for that job.
However, you should remember this pro tip: if you aren’t getting the applications that you want, don’t be quick to dismiss those websites. You might be tempted to do so if you don’t have enough qualified candidates or receive too many applications from non-qualified people. Still, simply dismissing those platforms won’t do you any good – mostly because it probably wasn’t the platform at fault, but the way in which you worded the ad.
To get the responses that you want, you might want to play with the ads a little bit. Go for a more descriptive title for the job so that the applicants know exactly what they are applying for. List down the skillset and responsibilities that the job seeker needs to have, and you will see that your applications will be much more condensed for what you need.
Everyone uses social media nowadays. Even those who are nearing the age of retirement are mostly on social media – so, you can expect that most of your working target audience will be there as well. Social media is somehow like a free job board – but one that is much closer to the applicant. In an article written for Forbes, Jacquelyn Smith, former staff leadership, emphasizes the benefits that social media brings to employee seekers.
“Sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ allow employers to get a glimpse of who you are outside the confines of a résumé, cover letter, or interview—while they offer job seekers the opportunity to learn about companies they’re interested in; connect with current and former employees; and hear about job openings instantaneously, among other things. That’s probably why half of all job seekers are active on social networking sites on a daily basis, and more than a third of all employers utilize these sites in their hiring process.”
What you’ll need to focus on here is how to find employees on LinkedIn. Since this is a professional social media platform, it is exactly where you’d expect people to go looking for a job. As a result, once you post your job offer there, you are very likely to receive some applications for it.
Besides LinkedIn, you might also want to look into how to find employees on Facebook or Twitter. There are countless groups on Facebook that job seekers may join – so, if you place a job offer on this platform, you are more likely to get a quick response. However, make sure that instead of casting a “wide net,” you are narrowing down your searches into specified groups. This way, you are less likely to receive applications from people that are not exactly qualified for the job.
Ask for Referrals
Perhaps one of the most efficient ways to find employees for your company is to ask for referrals. You may have colleagues working in the field – or you may have a friend that knows a friend that can give you a referral. You might not know these people personally, but the people that you asked to give you the referral will certainly know them enough. If they ended up recommending them to you, it means that they believe they are a good fit for the job.
Recommendations represent one of the most trustworthy options to go for – as Louie Ortiz, CEO of Monbi also mentioned.
“I find referrals to be one of the most efficient ways to find a new employee for your company, mostly because the person doing the recommendation already knows what the person is capable of. For example, let’s say that you post an ad with the job description, and a stranger forwards you their resume. You will have to trust what they wrote there, and you won’t be able to know how truthful they are. However, if someone recommends that person, you’ll know that their skills were witnessed firsthand – taking away the doubt that the applicant lied in their resume.”
Plus, by asking referrals, not only will you be cutting down the job advertising costs, but you will also reduce the time spent on the hiring process. You won’t have to waste as much time screening the calls, as you will have firsthand information from the person that gave you the referral.
Design SEO-Friendly Ads
When most people are looking for a job, they are using a set of keywords – and most of those keywords are professional. For example, no candidate will be looking for job titles such as “java wizard” or “sales guru.” They will be looking for fancier roles, such as web developer or sales manager. In this case, you might want to use regular titles.
Make your texts easier to read as well. A big chunk of text can end up being off-putting – particularly if the job seeker is using a cell phone to find a job. Break down the content in easier to digest chunks and take advantage of bullet points and lists to make things much easier to read.
You may also want to use as many relevant keywords as possible. You don’t want to go excessive on the jargon, but people need to find your content – and they’ll want to know what it entails before they apply. This is why you might want to be as clear and targeted with the keywords as possible.
Host Career Days or Attend Job Fairs
While this might require a small investment from you, job fairs and career days represent an efficient way for you to find employees – particularly when you do the hiring on a high volume. You can hire dozens of people in just one day, or even in just a matter of hours. After all, those people are all there so that they can find a job.
Keep an eye out for when these events take place – or if you can, host one yourself. They tend to take place once or several times a year, depending on how big the event is. Make sure to come with all the necessary materials (e.g. business cards, fillable forms, etc.) that will allow you to go through the screening process much quicker.
Create a Candidate Database
You may have the most well-thought-of recruitment strategies, and you may think that you have every position filled. However, you might not be able to predict when you suddenly lose your best worker, or your CEO starts shouting at you that “he needs employees right now”. If that happens, you might not have the luxury to start looking from scratch.
When times are not very stellar, you might want to take a look at the candidates you interviewed in the past. Maybe you actually had some good candidates there that you rejected simply because you had a much better candidate at that moment. Or you may have turned them down simply because they would have been more suitable for another position – one that you did not have available at that point.
This database of past candidates will allow you to skip the cumbersome time-killing process of publishing the ad, screening the resume, and so on. You can skip them simply because you’ve already been through this process before!
Bear in mind that unless you have a system in place, you’ll actually waste most time going through past applications that you would going through new ones. Keep an internal candidate database and store all the things that you remembered about their resume. An easier way would be to store everything digitally, as it will be much easier for you to keyword-search the roles that you are looking for.
Try Craigslist
Those of you that want to broaden their spectrum might want to look into how to find employees on Craigslist. This is a very popular platform for classified jobs – one that also has quite a decent number of job listing. Considering that the website itself is so diversified, there is a very high chance that you will find what you are looking for in there.
Bear in mind that if you want your job offer to be taken seriously, you will have to be as transparent as possible with what you have to offer. Many people post jobs anonymously there, and these offers are rarely taken seriously by those looking for a legit job, by fear of Craigslist scams. Louie Ortiz also has some comments in that regard.
“I’ve seen quite a lot of business owners placing an ad on Craigslist, without actually specifying who they were and what they actually dealt with. So many people were scammed on Craigslist – and other similar platforms, for that matter – this way, people will end up distrusting the ad even if it’s legit. This is why my advice is to be as honest as possible with the details, because this way, you will be attracting more potential employees. If you need employees now, be as honest with them as you expect them to be with you.”
Use a Staffing Agency
Those of you that do not know where to find hourly employees might want to look into staffing agencies. They are quite a good solution if you are in a hurry and do not have the time to go through the screening yourself. The agency will take care of that for you.
The good thing about a staffing agency is that you have the option of “trying before buying.” The agency will do all the recruiting and test the candidates for a job, in particular, vetting them thoroughly and finding out exactly in which area they excel. Not only will this help you cut the time waste, but it also lowers the risk of getting stuck with an under-qualified employer.
Final Thoughts
Finding employees is not that difficult, as long as you know where to look. Bear in mind that for your search to be successful, you need to be as generous with the job details as possible. This way, you won’t be getting hundreds of applications from people that don’t even qualify for the open post. By targeting and providing details, you will only get the applications that matter.
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Advertise Using Social Media