As a small business owner, it’s particularly important that you know the best place to find great employees. Unlike a large company, you likely don’t have a large recruiting budget, or maybe even dedicated human resource professionals on your staff. So, where can you find great employees?
The first step to take is to think about it from the perspective of top talent in your industry. If you were a qualified candidate for the job you’re looking to fill, where would you look first? It’s not like the old days, when a company would just post job openings in the classifieds of the local newspaper and job seekers would come running.
These days prospective employees, particularly the best potential candidates, typically have a large number of options, both in the opportunities available and the ways they can find them.
Again, there may be some specialized sources and media where you can search for candidates in your industry, but in general, you should consider the following approaches when searching for great job candidates.
5 Ideas For Best Places To Find Employees (#1 Is Often The Best)
- Your current employees can often be an excellent source of qualified job candidates. People tend to hang out with people who are similar to them, so if you have some great employees, incentivize them to refer their relevant friends and contacts to you. The rewards don’t have to be huge, but such an approach lets your employees know that you value their opinion and gives you an opportunity to find great employees at a relatively low cost.
- Use a recruiter who specializes in your industry or in the type of job you’re trying to fill. Such recruiters typically maintain an extensive rolodex of candidates, which puts you a step ahead when it comes to finding the most qualified talent available, as quickly as possible. This service doesn’t come cheap, not surprisingly, but given how time consuming most do-it-yourself approaches can be, the cost difference may not be as large as it appears on the surface. Typically, recruiting fees run between 15 and 20% of the candidate’s first year salary.
- Put your job posting on job boards. Job boards usually will have searchable job opportunities in many industries, although some boards are specialized. The key with job boards is to have a robust approach to filtering candidates, as it’s not unusual to get hundreds of potential candidates to an open position you post. Trying to find good fits for the job requirements and your company culture then becomes the challenge. Some of the most popular job boards include: Monster.com, Indeed.com and ZipRecruiter.com. As mentioned above, just make sure you have your hiring process dialed-in before you embark on using a job board to recruit, or it could get overwhelming quickly. Just processing job applications alone can be a full-time job, never mind tracking, screening, hiring and on-boarding candidates. Check out this article on recruiting software and tools that can help you find ways to streamline your recruitment process.
- Share your job opportunity on social media. As with using job boards, use this one with caution. Even more so than on job boards, this approach can lead to a deluge of unqualified or under-qualified candidates. If you do use this approach, you’ll definitely want to funnel all interested job seekers to one automated place to begin the screening process. Again, consider using some of the software and tools mentioned in the article above, which can automate and simplify your hiring process.
- Ask your business owner colleagues. Stay in regular contact with your small business owner friends. Share leads on prospective job candidates — particularly those you don’t think will work for you. A person that may not fit in well with your business or company culture, may do great at your colleague’s company. This can be tricky, of course, if your colleague is a competitor. So, be careful and make sure that any incoming referrals are well-screened, but in general, there is usually no harm in helping each other out in this particularly tough area of running and growing a business.
Qualified candidates try to find jobs in a variety of places. In many industries where it’s tough to find talent that’s willing and able to add value to your business, which is most industries these days, it’s key that you keep your antennae up and your feelers out with all potential sources of qualified employees. The above list of where to find great employees is a good starting point.
