This content was produced in partnership with ZipRecruiter.
Yes, you could get started right now posting a job opportunity on one of the many boards. But you’re not guaranteed to find the best candidates that way. Getting a worker for your open role, in any field, is never easy. This is even more the case when you need someone specialized or need to hire someone fast. Just posting a job and vetting candidates can take a while, let alone on-boarding your new employees. As your business grows, so too will this issue.
When looking for the right applicant, how do you create an engaging and desirable job posting? How do you look for people with specific skills and filter for only those who qualify? These are all really challenging questions that need to be asked, and answered, before getting your ideal worker on the scene.
The process can be confusing and, to be fair, rather daunting. Luckily, there are many smart and practical solutions that can help you during the hiring process no matter your level of expertise or business size. We’ve put together some useful tips to hire top-tier talent in your field, and beyond.
Become heard
It’s been said that the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
In other words, being “noisy” matters for hiring within your field. There’s a reason that thousands upon thousands of potential candidates go to the hiring pages of Amazon or Google each day. They know those companies and what they stand for. They’ve also got thousands of employees chattering about what they like about working there and a sizable recruiting department to seek out and nab the best of the best in the world. While the focus may not be on tech here, the point is that the largest and most renowned companies have a leg up because they’re so well-heard.
Chances are, however, if you’re reading this you aren’t the head of Google. As a smaller, maybe even medium-sized business, you need to generate potential leads to employees in another way. One possibility is to advertise that you are hiring alongside your normal public outreach campaigns. Another is to reach out to your network and see if there is somebody who knows a person with the skills you need.
While these two methods do work, eventually, and may be the most comfortable, they don’t cast a wide net and put an immediate skills cap on who your company will likely hire. Instead, consider posting to a job board. Or, better yet, multiple job boards. The best hiring sites have a large network of job boards and communities they interact with, for example. Just create your ad once and let them do the rest of the work. Options like TrafficBoost that can quickly promote your job to hundreds of likely candidates quickly.
Create the perfect job ad
Job ads are relatively easy to create and many hiring sites walk you through the process, but today’s workers are choosy. Despite dark clouds looming on the economic horizon, this class of worker not only has relatively high prospects, they’ve also been used to having higher-than-average prospects for quite some time.
The result is a hiring process that can feel flipped for some employers. Appealing to candidates can start to feel more like applying for them to work with you than the reverse. As a result, wishy-washy ads with unprofessional markups and low information are completely overlooked by the high-quality candidates your company is looking to hire.
To entice the right workers:
- Introduce your company with a friendly, but serious mission statement.
- Avoid “cutesy” job titles.
- Use bullet points to clearly list responsibilities, qualifications, and other info clearly.
- Be upfront about remote or hybrid work conditions. Candidates want to know about this before applying.
- Similarly, consider displaying salary ranges to avoid wasting both your and the potential candidate’s time.
- Show the job’s benefits to display you are a serious company.
If this all sounds a bit daunting or you’re worried that you’ll miss something that will put off the most talented professionals, you aren’t alone. Luckily, the modern job posting process takes a lot of work out of your hands. For example, when you enter a job title, the program will provide templates for many common job titles and provide expected salary expectations for your role.
The great filtration
Soon after your job ad goes live on a major hiring platform, resumes will start piling in. This can often lead to the exact opposite problem of not being seen at all. When it rains, it pours, and when you’re creating a good job you may as well expect a deluge.
While it’d be nice to sit down and fairly evaluate each resume, reading over every word, that probably isn’t feasible. Get tired of reading quickly? You’re in good company. Recruiters often look at resumes for a mere 7 seconds before continuing on.
You’ll need some sort of filtration. A resume database is one great example of a filtration system. The tool sorts through resumes in a database based on specific parameters, such as by location, skills, and even the date of resume upload. It can help you sort through applicants fast, and makes it easier to pinpoint candidates that match the job requirements.
Another cool factor? Once you start “liking” potential employees, many of these platforms will automatically start serving you similar candidates for that role so you can zero in on the perfect choice. Indeed’s Instant Match feature, duplicated in some way across a lot of hiring sites, auto connects the top candidates to your new job postings using qualifiers, keywords, and more.
Only great matches?
One of the somewhat hidden rules of job boards that is equally frustrating for candidates and employers is how they are paid for. At least partly by clicks. This results in a system where a job board is incentivized to push jobs in a candidate’s face that they might not even be interested in. Companies waste a lot of money on clicks they didn’t want and applicants waste a ton of time sorting through the garbage.
When potential candidates apply through the ZipRecruiter website, the view is totally different from typical boards. It actually lets the candidates get a good feel for their strength before applying by giving them a match strength as seen here:
According to reports, only 10% of applications are identified as a “Great Match.” If you have one as a job seeker, there is a much higher chance that your application will get recognized by the employer. It encourages you to apply. On the other hand, if you don’t have one, there’s less incentive to click. Nobody’s time or money is wasted and only the workers with the specific skills you need will be tempted to apply.
Another awesome thing about this system is that it can remind employees to add old experiences in their resumes they might’ve overlooked. For example, I’m a commerce writer now, but used to do foreign language teaching. By adding that fact to my resume I was given more opportunities to see writing jobs for ESL companies and given a Match-rating boost for those jobs. In other words, this system can bring out potential employees’ hidden skills. This is especially important in fields, where candidates may be reluctant to include non-related experience.
Avoid unnecessary costs
You’re already seeking to pay someone money. That comes with a lot of costs: salary, risks of lawsuits, training, and possibly new office equipment.
As hinted at above, the candidate search process can take some money as well. It’s one of the reasons why so many employers skip out on job boards and hire via nepotism or current employee referrals instead.
Unfortunately, this method of gathering reliable and talented workers can present you with a workforce lacking diversity, having a huge skills gap, and not being up for the new challenges of tomorrow. To say it plainly, your C++ guy probably knows a ton of other C++ guys, but you already have one of those.
The silver lining in all of this is that even if you’re just getting started with hiring sites like ZipRecruiter nearly the entire process is free. Before you even have to enter your payment info you’ll start out on a free trial. As your free trial ends, you’ll be presented with a custom-created plan and pricing to fit your needs. Support and product specialists are also just a phone call away to get the plan details you need.
So, what are you waiting for? Post your job on ZipRecruiter today and start finding your perfect candidate today!
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