5 Online Recruiting Tips For Finding Candidates Quickly & Successfully

Recruiting candidates for your company has traditionally involved making classified ads, attending career fairs, and networking. 

While these are all solid recruiting methods, the advent of the Internet has explosively expanded candidates' and employers' options. 

But with LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, Monster and more comes a lot more noise. Trying to find employees online could be overwhelming. Recruiting now has a sort of paradox of choice; there are so many candidates, how to you find the top-notch employees? And which do you reach out to?

Fortunately, we've compiled 5 recruiting tips that will make it much easier to find great people online.

(Psst.... we've also created a guide on winning the talent war to find and keep top hires. Download it for free here.)

Create an Effective Online Recruiting Strategy 

A reminder: Before you can start recruiting online, it’s important to have the job description locked down and to ensure that you actually know what you’re looking for.  Make sure your business is actually ready to hire an employee. Once you are, though, here are ways to succeed.

For the sake of this article, let’s assume that you are looking to hire a Director of Software Engineering and that your business is in New York City.

1. Know What the Position Demands

If you’ve never hired for this role before, you might be unsure what the demands are from a compensation perspective. One tool that I’ve found to be very helpful as an employee for knowing what my position goes for is Salary.com. Type in the title of the position plus the zip code and it will give information on how much the median pay is in that area.

Can you not afford the salary results you find? Then perhaps you should rethink the position you're looking for or the required qualifications for the position. Or, you might need to change the required qualifications for the position. Understanding the compensation needs will save you plenty of time and also give you hints about what candidates will expect if you try to poach them.

2. Be Active, Not Passive

Finding the best candidates for your company doesn't require just posting a job description and hoping people will find you (unless you're Google). 

Be as active as possible in looking for potential candidates. You can look for candidates that fit within a specific role or just candidates that could be a good fit with your company, whatever the role. The important part is kick starting a conversation about their interest in other opportunities.

Actively recruiting candidates online creates a potential problem: the employee may not be looking to leave. But many employees could be happy at their job, while also being open to new opportunity. These are the candidates you should seek out.

The next question is: how and where do you find the talent?

3. LinkedIn Reigns Supreme

The reality is, if you’re actively looking for talent for your company, hiring on LinkedIn is your best bet. 

Consider searching for candidates in two ways: on LinkedIn and through Google.

Often times, Google is better at crawling a website and finding pages than even LinkedIn is. Take this and paste it into Google:

site:www.linkedin.com “software engineering”

There are two parts to this search. The first is the “site:” part, which is your way of telling Google what website, specifically, you want the search engine to focus on. It will only return results with that domain name.

The second part is the query. This tells Google you want to find pages with “software engineering” in it.

Compare these results to what you do in a search on LinkedIn and it's significantly different. I get nearly 52,000 results on a regular LinkedIn search, but just shy of 9,000 using the Google Search. Which one is better? 

4. Look at the Endorsers

How to know which candidates have the experience you're looking for? 

To start off, view a candidate's endorsements. In the above image, you can see my endorsements on LinkedIn. Perhaps some of the people that have endorsed me for SEO might also be qualified at SEO. Therefore, you could go through their profiles to try and find potential candidates.

A bit of caution about the endorsement section. It’s very easy to click “yes, this person has these skills” on LinkedIn. So I wouldn’t take it terribly seriously when it comes to determining the quality of the candidate; but for a research tool, it can open up your world to a greater bunch of candidates.

5. Ask Your Network

Believe it or not, the easiest way to get a job at any company is to find someone in the company you know. Our networks make getting new jobs so much easier. It’s not what you know, but who you know.

Shoot an email to your network asking them if they know anyone that might be interested in the position. Don't underestimate the power of a referral - your network won't suggest something they have doubts about.

Therefore, you’re likely to get really qualified potential candidates in your email. More importantly, you can break the ice with the candidate by commenting on your shared connection and how the candidate came highly recommended for this position.

Get Them Set Up With Justworks

Once you do hire the candidate, get them set up in the Justworks platform. All their new-hire forms, payroll, and benefits will all be taken care of for you so that you can focus on building great, new software with your new director of software engineering. Justworks handles the busy work so you can continue growing your business.