Finding Employees: The Complete Guide (2017 Update)

One of the biggest challenges agency owners face when running and growing their business is to find and retain high quality employees.

"As you know, it's always very tough to find talent with the right attitude. A lot of candidates have skills, but one should also have the thirst to learn more." - Jaseem Ts, Co-Founder and CEO at WowMakers.

First, let's go through some statistics:

1. 30% of surveyed agencies cited "Hiring top talent" as one of their top challenges. ¹
2. 78% of agency clients reported being concerned about their agency of choice's digital expertise. ²
3. 50% of people said they wanted more challenging work from agencies, compared to a 36% global average, and 46% are unsatisfied with agency leadership. ³

Getting Started

Slack is an instant messaging and collaboration tool used by teams all over the world.

If you haven't used Slack yet, think of it as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) on steroids. Similar to IRC, you can create both public and private channels.

To get the most out of Slack you’ll have to invest some time in discussions. This mightn’t be your first option when trying to hire an employee on short notice. But, building relationships with qualified professionals will improve your sourcing, long-term. - Christina Pavlou, HR Content writer / Researcher at Workable

How To: Finding relevant Slack communities

Slack communities can either be free or paid.

The best way to find slack communities is through slack directories:

• Hamsterpad
• Slack List
• Chit Chats
• SloFile

Alex Kistenev from Standuply has also created a great list of Slack communities you might want to check out.

It is also becoming increasingly common for subreddit moderators to create their own slack channel.

Most of the time you'll find the Slack channel in the subreddit's sidebar:

Outreach Tips: Connecting with Slack community users

• Engage first, pitch later. Slack channels are built primarily for discussions and networking. Make sure you contribute to the community first, before pitching any job openings.

Getting Started

Your company blog can be one of your most powerful tools for building up your brand name.

However, apart from building a brand name among potential customers, sharing your team's culture can help you land some great talent.

How To: Attracting talent to your company via your blog

One of the best examples of how you can use your blog to attract talent to your company is Groove.

As explained by Groove's CEO, Alex Turnbull:

On the outside, this blog is the biggest example of that. Simply reading these posts can give most people a fantastic idea of whether they'd fit in here or not.

And, since we've launched the blog and continued to hire, every single person we've hired has been a reader of this blog.

So, how does Groove attract talent via their blog?

They do it by being transparent.

Groove not only share their business metrics, but they're also transparent about their culture.

Company culture is very important to our team. We emphasize company culture strongly during the hiring process.

James Laverdure, Business Development Manager at Space Studio.

Our goal is to build strong brands by helping them identify, claim, and build up their digital space while staying on trend with the latest and greatest solutions.

Being transparent about your company culture and values can help with attracting like-minded individuals. This is exactly what happened at Mightybytes when they started making craft beer for their clients.

Company culture is very important to us as part of the hiring process. We brew on the clock, and often do collaborative strategic planning as a group.

Plus, being a B Corp is a huge part of our company identity, so those are things we discuss during the interview process. We also really like using B Work to manage the hiring process. Great tool to find mission-aligned team members.

Tim Frick, CEO of Mightybytes.

A frequent speaker and conference presenter, Tim offers workshops and presentations on web design, content strategy, digital marketing, social impact business, and sustainability.

You can also use Blogging Communities, such as ProBlogger, to effectively hire writers and creatives for your team.

We've had success with a number of channels - Craigslist, local job boards and word-of-mouth referrals for employees, and Problogger for the creatives on our team.

The biggest factor for us hasn't been the channel we use, but implementing skills testing as part of our interview process. To me, it matters less where you find people, and more that you're reaching people who can handle the work you need covered.

Sarah Rickerd, Owner and Managing Director at Content Conquered.

Providing web content creation and copywriting services that help business owners expand their personal and professional brands online.

Getting Started

Facebook Business pages can be one of the best channels to showcase your company's culture.

One of the advantages of using your business page as a recruitment platform is the fact that Facebook lets you engage with prospective candidates on a more personal level.

Facebook will also help you increase your brand presence, build more trust and consequently, attract better candidates.

How To: Attracting candidates via your Facebook business page

Two of the best examples of how you can use your Facebook business page to attract talent to your company are Lama Media and WowMakers.

How Lama Media use their Facebook business page to attract prospective candidates

For me the most unique thing about Lama Media’s employer branding is showing off our employees’ passions and the atmosphere we work in. We develop our professional skills at Lama Academy - inside cyclical meet-ups, which we often mention on our Facebook page.

What’s more, after work hours majority of our team sing or play instruments, so for 2 years in Christmas time we cover popular Christmas songs, effects of what you can see here and here.

We get a lot of feedback from interviewed potential employees, that the Christmas song was the major reason of sending a resume - that’s why we decided on including links with it to the job advertisements.

Aneta Ilnicka, Marketing & Communication at Lama Media.

A Polish web development company, composed of specialists who design, create and maintain websites according to a structured process.

How WowMakers use their Facebook business page to attract prospective candidates

As you know, it's always very tough to find talents with the right attitude. A lot of candidates have skills, but one should also have the thirst to learn more. At WowMakers, we usually get the maximum results from age-old word-of-mouth from our network.

Along with that, social networks really help. We have a good following on Facebook. Being a creative studio, we try to design creative posters for hiring. Here's something we've shared recently to find a script writer.

Apart from Facebook, we also share it on LinkedIn. In total - we've received over 80+ candidate requests combined from Facebook and LinkedIn.

Note that we haven't boosted any of these posts.

Jaseem Ts, Co-Founder and CEO at WowMakers.

A Digital Media Studio with a mission to empower businesses to effectively spread their ideas and messages through creative story-telling, with a personal touch.

Getting Started

Job boards allow you to post jobs, screen and hire candidates, from one place.

Of course, finding relevant job boards is dependent on both your location and your niche.

Also, job boards might have different pricing structures. Some charge per job post while others charge a monthly fee.

How To: Finding quality Job Boards

Finding relevant job boards is all about doing research in your city, country or niche.

At the moment we’re using Facebook and a Polish version of LinkedIn named GoldenLine.

Together with local networking, events, workshops and local community relations - it works nice.

Chris Parjaszewski, Co-Founder of SkyGate.

A web product development company that creates brands, websites & web apps for startups and corporations.

When it comes to finding niche related job boards, the best place to start your search is Reddit.

Search in a country/city subreddit

If you are hiring people in France, you might want to head over to France's subreddit.

The next step is to find posts from people looking for jobs.

Here's how to do it:

Popular job boards

There are a lot of Job Boards available on the internet. This list contains some of the most widely used Job Boards.

Bonus tip: If you don't have the time to post your vacancies on each and every job board, you can use services similar to Proven.

Generic

• Indeed
• Monster
• CareerBuilder
• Glassdoor

Designers

• Dribbble Jobs
• Authentic Jobs
• Behance
• Coroflot

We use behance to find professionals in different creative fields - Behance profile.

Eugene Rudyy, Designer at Keepa.

Based in Lviv, Ukraine, we collaborate with web and software developers in the area of interface and design solutions.

Developers

• GitHub Jobs
• Stack Overflow Careers
• Android Jobs
• Core Intuition

Startups

• Angel.co Jobs
• Startupers

Remote Teams

• FlexJobs
• Remote OK
• We Work Remotely
• Working Nomads
• Remotive
• Remote Working

Marketing

• Inbound Jobs

Mentors are one of the best sources for finding talented employees.

Why? Because talented people are actively seeking advice, trying to improve their skills and consequently, their life.

How To: Finding mentors

When looking for mentors, you have to start by thinking backwards.

For example, if you're looking for software engineers, ask yourself, "Who would a software engineer seek advice from?"

Mentors, for example, could be:

• College professors. Smart people tend to look up to and take advice from smarter folk. College professors tend to have access to some of the best alumni, which makes them a great partner for getting talented employees.
• Influencers. Same as with college professors, smart people tend to look up to well connected influencers. Building relationships with influencers might be a great strategy to spread the word for your open positions.

Outreach Tips: Contacting Mentors

• Give first, ask for favours later. Never reach out solely to ask for favours. Put yourself in their shoes and your success rates will improve dramatically.
• Contact them on LinkedIn or kick off new relationships by Email. Find their email address using VoilaNorbert or Hunter.

Getting Started

LinkedIn is the leading business social network.

In the words of Susan M. Heathfield,

The potential for LinkedIn and other social networking sites to play a major role in your employee recruiting strategy increases as millions of potential employees profile themselves on these sites each year.

You can use LinkedIn to:

• Stay in touch with former employees.
• Search for candidates among LinkedIn members.
• Get recommended to candidates by people in your network.

How To: Finding employees on LinkedIn

You can either use the standard LinkedIn search or the more powerful Google search capabilities.

If you're using the standard LinkedIn search, keep in mind that some options might be restricted if you're not using a LinkedIn premium subscription.

To set up your Google search query, just follow the query template below:

"<job title>" "<City Or Coutnry>" site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -inurl:"dir/" -inurl:"jobs/"

• ~"<job title>": Tries to match profiles with the provided keywords. You can use the tilde "~" to instruct Google to look for synonyms for your particular keyword. E.g: Web Designer.
• "City OR Country": Looks for profiles of users located in particular cities or countries.
• site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub: Restricts search results to only show publicly accessible LinkedIn profile pages.

So, if you're looking for a Web Designer in San Francisco, you would search for:

"Web Designer" "San Francisco" site:linkedin.com/in OR site:linkedin.com/pub -inurl:"dir/" -inurl:"jobs/"

Here are some of the search results:

I've reached out to Gail Gardner, the Founder of GrowMap (small business mentoring), to get her take on the importance of LinkedIn during candidate screening:

I choose collaborators based on what I see them write and share online, especially on Twitter. When someone's work catches my eye, I look them up on LinkedIn. Anyone serious about being hired or approached as a collaborator should have an optimized LinkedIn profile that makes it clear what they do and what inquiries they are interested in receiving.

Unfortunately, social media networks including LinkedIn do not really make good CRMs so it is necessary to use something else to keep track of interactions and status.

Gail Gardner, Founder of GrowMap

She is a Small Business Marketing Strategist and mentors small businesses, bloggers, and freelancers.

Outreach Tips: Contacting LinkedIn users

• Engage with prospective candidates. Once you've established a relationship, add them as a friend on LinkedIn. Contact them via email. Find their email address using VoilaNorbert or Hunter.

Getting Started

LinkedIn Groups provide a place for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share content, find answers, post and view jobs, make business contacts, and establish themselves as industry experts. - LinkedIn

LinkedIn Groups are a gold mine if you are looking for talented employees.

If you're unfamiliar with LinkedIn Groups, think of them as small forums that get together people that share similar interests.

However, beware that most of LinkedIn Groups are either inactive, littered with spam or both.

How To: Finding employees on LinkedIn Groups

Step 1 - Find relevant LinkedIn Groups

Finding LinkedIn Groups is as easy as performing a group search on LinkedIn:

Step 2 - Find relevant discussions and members

Once you've found the groups you were looking for, your next job is to identify whether they are active or not.

If they are, you can start engaging in relevant discussions.

Once you've engaged with some of the group's members, feel free to reach out by sending a message on LinkedIn.

Just click on the members link and reach out to people in the Members List.

Getting Started

Reddit is an entertainment and news website where users can share content. - Computer Business Review

Reddit is made up of many individual communities, also known as subreddits. Each community has its own page, subject matter, users and moderators.

Users post stories, links, and media to these communities, and other users vote and comment on such posts.

Through voting, users determine which posts rise to the top of community pages and, by extension, the public home page of the site.

How To: Finding employees on Reddit

Step 1 - Find a job posting subreddit

To find job related subreddits, head over to SnoopSnoo and check out their Subreddit search.

Remember that apart from the popular job subreddits, you might want to check out niche subreddits.

For example, if you're looking for Sys Admins or need employees from Vancouver, you can check out the following subreddits:

• Sys Admin Jobs - /r/SysAdminJobs
• VancouverJobs - /r/VancouverJobs

You can find a big list of hiring subreddits in the /r/karmajobs wiki.

Popular hiring subreddits

• For Hire - /r/forhire
• Jobbit - /r/jobbit
• Job openings - /r/jobopenings
• Jobs for Expats - /r/iwantoutjobs

Step 2 - Post your job

When posting a job on reddit, make sure you understand the subreddit rules.

Also, make sure that your post stands out. You can do so by making your title controversial. Just make sure the title is not too much of a clickbait as that might get you banned in some subreddits.

Becca Russell, Senior Researcher at Social Media Search has written a great post on how to recruit talent on Reddit. Make sure to check it out.

Outreach Tips: Contacting Reddit users

• Add a clear call to action to your post. Don't just message Reddit users who comment on your post. Build a landing page and link to that particular landing page, this way you can test the effectiveness of your Reddit campaign, while giving prospective candidates a clear way to post their CVs or links to their portfolios.

Getting Started

Most former employees will regret ever leaving their job.

In fact, with a simple Quora search, you can find countless people asking for advice on how to deal with such regret.

Here's one of them:

Some of the benefits of employing former employees include:

• Bypassing the interview process. If they've been away for just a couple of months, there's no real need of going through the lengthy interview process once again.
• Quicker onboarding process. You could also skip your employee onboarding process if your processes haven't changed that much.

How To: Recruiting former employees

Keep in touch

According to HR expert Susan M. Heathfield:

"You don't want to lose touch with people who have worked successfully for you or with you in the past. They could be your best future employees - or send you your best future employees."

Also, according to Marketing expert at GreenJobInterview, Holly Wade:

"Any ex-employee will likely stay in their field and gather more experience, so if you recruit them back, they may be an even better asset for your company. Keep in touch through LinkedIn and let them know you'd love to see them back one day. Follow their career and see where they end up, and maybe you'll be able to capture more boomerang employees."

Getting Started

Internships are a great way to nurture potential future employees.

According to Penny Loretto, hiring interns brings a plethora of benefits to your company, such as:

• Fresh perspective. By bringing in students who aren't inside your company every day, they can offer a fresh perspective on your business, strategies, and plans.
• Enhancing your social strategy. Take the opportunity to explain your social strategy to your interns and get their feedback. This provides young people the opportunity to incorporate what they've taught themselves about social media into the real world and their internship.
• Extra set of hands. An intern can provide you with an extra set of hands that can often help accomplish goals or finish projects. As long as the project will indeed help a young person learn a new skill, learn more about the industry, and give them a great learning experience, interns can work with other employees in the office on specific projects.
• Mentorship opportunities. Many employees look to mentor young people. An internship program provides an opportunity for your current employees to connect with these college students, meet with them, speak with them, and ultimately, mentor them.
• Plant seeds for future employment. It's a great opportunity for you to test out this new working relationship and vice versa. Many Fortune-500 companies retain over 80% of their interns as entry-level hires.

How To: Finding interns

College campus organizations

The best channel for us other than LinkedIn is going direct to Universities where they have a MSc in Digital Marketing. We are lucky in Dublin in that 2 of the top Universities here run a Digital Marketing Masters courses.

Typically we hire interns from the course and if they prove themselves we take them on a full time basis.

Ian Blake, Co-founder and Managing Director, Squaredot Inbound Marketing

Helping ambitious companies grow with Inbound Marketing. We cook up tasty content and deliver it on a silver digital platter for your audience.

Find local college organizations and ask around for intra-college job boards.

Another tactic you might use is to send a job description to the college's career development office.

Make it clear and concise, with a unique value proposition for their students. This way, they might promote your job opportunity to their student database.

Reddit

You can search for job posting opportunities within the Reddit community.

Here are some of the most popular internship subreddits:

• Internships - /r/internships
• Young Jobs - /r/YoungJobs

Internship Websites

There are a lot of recruitment websites for finding interns.

Here's a list of some of the most popular websites:

• Internmatch
• Internships
• YouTern

Outreach Tips: Contacting interns

• Sell the future. Interns are primarily looking to learn and build their resume. Sell them the role and how they'll be able to achieve their short term and long term goals.
• Plan non-work activities. Help them bond with other interns and employees. An internship is not only about the work, it has to be fun too.

Getting Started

Twitter is one of the most widely used micro blogging platforms.

What makes Twitter such a great communication platform is the fact that you can easily participate in ongoing discussions.

How To: Finding employees on Twitter

Twitter Biographies

One of the best ways to search in Twitter bios is to use a tool called, FollowerWonk.

You can also narrow down your search by setting up some advanced options, such as Locations and Minimum number of Tweets.

Hashtags

Twitter is all about being active where prospective candidates hang out.

To do that, you'll need to understand how to find relevant Twitter conversations.

One tool that can help you out with finding popular hashtags is Hashtagify.

Outreach Tips: Contacting Twitter users

• Follow them. The first step to engaging with someone on Twitter is to follow them. If users follow you back, that means you can use Twitter's private messaging functionality and contact them directly on Twitter.
• Add them to Twitter lists. Adding users to Twitter lists can make your candidates feel unique. Make sure your Twitter lists are public and do let them know that you've just added them to a particular list. For example, if you're targeting web design candidates, you might name your list, "Professional Web Designers".
• Engage with users in relevant discussions. You should take an in-depth look at their post history and participate or @mention them in new conversations.

Getting Started

Employee referrals are a great way of leveraging your existing employee network to find trustworthy ex-colleagues and friends.

In fact, when we asked Erik Rostad, Founder of EPR Creations, what is his go to tactic for finding the best employees, he immediately replied with - "Word of mouth".

Here are some employee referral statistics that outline time immense power of hiring through employee referrals:

46% of hires at top performing firms are employee referrals. ⁵

It takes on average 29 days to fill positions with employee referrals, compared to 39 days for job boards. ⁶

46% of referred employees are retained after one year, compared to 22% from job boards. ⁶

How To: Increasing employee referrals

According to Kiran Dhillon, the following tips will help put your employee referral program into overdrive:

• Award Cash bonuses. A nice chunk of change never hurts, but remember that cash incentives are only part of the puzzle. Google, for example, found that doubling their cash bonus for referrals didn't help boost their numbers.
• Dispense swag. Awarding individual employees or departments with swag, like a t-shirt, is another great way to recognize contributors. When employees are walking around with shirts broadcasting their referral efforts, it also helps embed referring into your company culture.
• Success stories. Another way to put referrals on the radar during company or department-wide meetings is to celebrate success stories. Share the details of how an employee was referred, their journey to getting hired, and their contributions to the team since.
• Hold 15-minute coffee/source jams with every new employee. Why wait to scour a new employee's network? Building quick source jams into new hire onboarding is an orderly way for your recruiting team to discover any immediate potential fits and familiarize themselves with possible future candidates - even if there are currently no open roles.

I've also contacted successful agency owners like Inertia Digital Marketing to get their take on which channels get them their best employees.

I have historically relied heavily on LinkedIn and referrals. Referrals have always given me the most talented and creative individuals.

Adam Palmer, Founder of Inertia Digital Marketing.

A Nashville based creative agency specializing in custom content & digital marketing strategies.

Getting Started

Niche social bookmarking websites are link posting sites that target a particular audience.

Social bookmarking websites are usually built around a particular topic or goal.

Two examples of social bookmarking sites would be Inbound, targeting the marketing community, and HackerNews, targeting startup founders and software engineers.

How To: Finding employees on social bookmarking sites

Finding employees on social bookmarking sites is all about finding and contributing to relevant discussions.

Before contributing to any social bookmarking website, make sure you read the posting and commenting rules.

Most niche bookmarking sites are commonly frequented and spammed by recruiters and sales people. This means that cold messaging people without prior engagement on such sites is not recommended.

Some sites might have powerful search capabilities. If they don't, you can always create your custom Google searches queries to find prospective candidates on such sites.

Popular social bookmarking sites

Small Business

• Bizsugar

Web Design

• Design Bump
• Design Float

Marketing

• Inbound.org

Startups

• Hacker News
• Growth Hackers

Outreach Tips: Contacting people on social bookmarking sites

• Add value to relevant discussions. The best way to connect with prospective candidates on social bookmarking sites is to engage in relevant discussions. Once you've established social capital, you can build better relationships on realtime channels, such as Twitter.

Getting Started

Networking events, apart from being a good way for finding business partners, are also a great way for finding new employees.

What makes networking events great recruitment venues is the fact that they are usually set up in a relaxed atmosphere.

This makes it much easier not only to approach prospective employees but to also observe the way they interact with other people.

How To: Finding networking events

Meetup

An online social networking portal that facilitates offline group meetings in various localities around the world.

Eventbrite

A global marketplace for live experiences that allows people to find and create events in 190 countries.

Outreach Tips: Connecting with prospective employees at networking events

• Look up attendees on the networking event page and engage with them beforehand on social media.
• Stay close to the food table.
• Look around for people standing alone.

Running an open day at your offices can be a great way for your company to attract potential employees.

The benefits of running an open recruitment day are numerous, namely:

• A chance for prospective employees to interact with your staff.
• A great way for prospective employees to understand your company's culture.
• A great way to demonstrate transparency.

How To: Organizing a company open (recruitment) day

According to Corecruitment, hosting a successful recruitment day is all about communication and coordination.

Here are some of their guidelines:

• Work together. Your staff must work together and pool their efforts to plan and organize the open day. It is essential that you make the event a team effort.
• Plan the date. Think carefully about the date. Organize the event far enough in advance that you can promote it in time.
• Snacks and drinks. It's up to you if you want to offer food such as canapes or other snacks, but it is advisable to at least offer coffee, tea and water to visitors. It helps to create a friendly, welcoming atmosphere and also to avoid any awkward silences.
• Advertising the open day. Create a special landing page on your website dedicated to the event. If your business location is accessible to the public, make use of easily visible signs or posters advertising the event.

Outreach Tips: Connecting with your open day attendees

• Collect personal information. Your open day attendees might not need a job now, but they might be looking for a new job in the future. Make sure you collect any personal information you might need in the future.
• Make it shareable. Not everyone would be able to make it to your open day. However, setting up a small photo booth and tagging attendees in social media photos goes a long way in letting people know about your company.

Getting Started

If you're looking for a stream of employees with a particular skill set, it might be a great idea to provide a course/guide around a complementary (parallel) skill set.

For example, if you're constantly on the lookout for Graphic Designers, you might want to offer a short online course/guide titled: "Introduction to HTML for Graphic Designers".

Building an online course/guide will help you:

• Increase brand awareness
• Engage with prospective employees
• Improve brand trust
• Get new subscribers that might eventually become employees

How To: Marketing your short course/guide

Social Media, Blogging Platforms and Social Bookmarking sites

Once you've finished writing your course/guide, you can share it on various social media platforms, such as:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Google+
• Reddit
• Hacker News
• Growth Hackers
• Inbound
• Quora
• Medium

Learning sites

You can also share your content on learning and content curation sites, such as:

• Guides
• Udemy
• Skillshare

Check your competitor's links

Find a competing course/guide and run the web URL through a backlink checker tool.

You can use various backlink checkers, such as Ahrefs, SerpStat and SemRush.

You'll find a whole new world of opportunities where you can share your course/guide.

Influencers

Contact industry influencers and let them now about your new course/guide.

Make sure that you have a unique value proposition and pitch them on how sharing your new course/guide will add value to their audience.

Outreach Tips: Contacting subscribers

• Keep your subscribers engaged. Your course/guide subscribers might not need a job now, but they might be looking for a new job in the future.
• Create fresh content. Publishing fresh and quality content will help your subscribers and prospective employees trust your brand more. It might even help you gain influencer status and more social capital around a particular niche.

Getting Started

Recruitment Agencies can act as the middle man between your company and prospective candidates.

It goes without saying that the biggest challenge when finding a recruitment agency is to find one that is trustworthy and has an excellent track record.

Recruitment Agencies can usually be divided into three different groups:

• Generic agencies. These agencies will usually keep multiple databases for different industries.
• Niche specialized agencies. These agencies will specialize in a particular niche, such as Online Gaming or Information Technology.
• Temp agencies. These agencies will provide your company with temporary workers. If you need particular employees for a short period of time (e.g: 6 months), you can loan workers from the temp agency.

How To: Finding recruitment agencies

LinkedIn

94% of recruiters are active on LinkedIn. ⁴

As you quite rightly guessed, recruitment agencies are very active on LinkedIn.

You can either do a LinkedIn search (if you're a premium member) or use some Google search tricks to get more or less, the same result.

So, if you're looking for a Recruitment Agency in San Francisco, you would search for:

"Industry * Staffing and Recruiting" "San Francisco" inurl:linkedin.com/company/

Here are some of the search results:

Business referrals

Referrals are a great way to understand if a recruitment agency is trustworthy.

Here are some places where you can find recruitment referrals:

• LinkedIn testimonials
• Local Facebook groups
• Local and online business communities
• Online recruiter directories
• Blog and media mentions

How To: Doing background checks on recruitment agencies

David Smooke, recruitment industry expert and Director of Content Marketing at SmartRecruiters, offers quality advice on how to properly evaluate recruitment agencies:

• Time to source. What is their time to source for this position in this industry at this location?
• Price. Most recruiting agencies charge in the neighborhood of 15-25% of the position’s first year’s salary. It can be higher for extremely in demand positions and it can be lower for positions with a surplus of labor. In finding your budget on this hire, you must weigh how well your other sourcing channels are performing and how much revenue the company is losing everyday by not having this position filled.
• Interview Rate (CV to interview). What percentage of their candidates submitted for interviews end up being hired? With agencies, you are paying a premium for top talents, so every candidate better be good.

Also, Prashant Jagad, Founder of The HRism (helping startups with quality hiring), sheds some light on how to choose the best recruitment consultants/agencies :

• Ask for References. Call companies that use the services of the agency to inquire about its reliability, ethical practices & professionalism and any other things which you might require before joins hands with placement agency.
• Jack of all trades or Master of one. Find the Master of One rather than jack of all trades because the recruitment agencies who claims they are masters of a particular domain might have more in-depth understanding about your business.
• Consultant's qualifications or experience. Once you have identified some relevant agencies in your area, ask them about their consultants experience and qualifications as this will give you an indication that the consultant you are going to deal with is well-experienced, qualified and is well versed in recruitment law and practices.

Outreach Tips: Contacting recruitment agencies

• Be as specific as possible. If you're looking for particular skills don't just assume that recruiters will be on the lookout for those same skills, add them to your job description.
• Be as nice as possible. Recruiters already have to struggle due to some bad apples within the recruitment industry. Being as helpful and as nice as possible will go a long way in a recruiter's book.

Getting Started

Setting up a career page on your company's website is one of the go to strategies when it comes to finding employees.

However, apart from setting up your career page, you will need to invest time in crafting an effective distribution strategy.

How To: Building and marketing your careers page

Build an awesome career page

It's not only about getting prospective candidates to your careers page, it's all about converting them.

Rob Kelly, Co-Founder and CEO at Ongig, has curated a list of inspirational career pages that you might want to check out.

Copy your competition's marketing

Find a competitor's careers page and run the web URL through a backlink checker tool. This way you'll be able to get ideas where your competitors are sharing (advertising) their career pages.

You can use various backlink checkers, such as Ahrefs, SerpStat and SemRush.

Here's how you can find who's linking to your competitor's (Google, in our case) career pages with SerpStat:

You'll discover a whole new world of opportunities where you can share your careers page.

Outreach Tips: Connecting with your visitors

• Make your offering as clear as possible. Avoid using stock photos and cheesy titles, such as "ninja". If it sounds too childish, it probably is.
• Make it as appealing as possible. Create a win-win situation and offer a crystal clear advantage over your competitors.

Getting Started

Hackathons are a great way to meet and exchange ideas with fellow developers and creatives.

The great thing about hackathons is that they tend to attract people that are willing to work in a challenging environment.

It's also a great way to build a brand name around a particular talent pool.

How To: Running a Hackathon

In no particular order, here are some tips on how to run a hackathon from the great step-by-step guide by Joshua Tauberer:

• Be welcoming to newcomers. Newcomers often suffer from imposter syndrome, the feeling that they don't belong because they don't have skills, aren't smart enough, etc. They're wrong, of course, but until they feel like they belong they will not be able to have a fulfilling experience. It is the hackathon organizer's job to help them realize they have something to contribute.
• Find a venue and reserve the date. The venue should provide proper seating, one power strip per table, Wifi, a projector, a microphone and should have accessible entrances and wheelchair-friendly seating space.
• Set up seating requirements. For hacking, you will want a banquet-style setup with large circular tables that seat about 10 people each.
• Find sponsors. Sponsors will give you something (cash, space, food, t-shirts) with the expectation that they get something out of their support for your event. They might be marketing a product that they want to promote.
• Set up your marketing. Reach out to whoever might be able to help. Partner with referrals and get attendees through those referrals.
• Budget for food. Ideally you should provide coffee and light fare for breakfast and beverages throughout the day (especially water). If you provide any food, you really must supply vegetarian and dairy-free options because these dietary restrictions are very common.
• Provide swag. You can provide your attendees with swag, like t-shirts or stickers. Don't get one-size-fits-all t-shirts because people aren't all alike.
• Set up a code of conduct. A code of conduct is not just about enforcing rules. It sets community norms and sends a signal to would-be participants that you are trying to create a welcoming environment.

Outreach Tips: Connecting with prospective employees at Hackathons

• Collect personal information. You'll need to keep your hackathon attendees engaged not only during the hackathon, but afterwards as well. Set up marketing campaigns and share content that helps them out; they'll love you for it.
• Make it shareable. When setting up your hackathon, make sure that the whole experience is easily shareable on social media. You can get started by setting up your custom hashtag and encourage everyone at the hackathon to use that hashtag.

Getting Started

You might think TV and radio advertising are dead. Or maybe not effective anymore. Well, if you do, you'd be very, very wrong.

TV is still considered the gold standard for marketing.

In fact, 30% of consumers in the US⁷ perceive online advertising as less effective than offline advertising.

Also, according to Deloitte, 10% of respondents⁸ said that they searched for products online after having seen a TV ad.

So, why use TV or radio advertising your job opening? Simple. Because not a lot of your competitors are doing it.

This means that unlike in the social media and online world, TV and radio advertising lets you stand out.

How To: Finding Ad agencies

The process of finding good Ad agencies is very similar to that of finding recruitment agencies.

The difference here is that you if you decide to go down the do-it-yourself route, you'll need to understand how to:

• Set up engaging scripts
• Take care of video production
• Get in front of a more targeted audience

Outreach Tips: Connecting with your audience

• Be as specific as possible. You don't want to target everyone with your TV or radio Ad, so make sure you're crafting a script that connects your target audience with your brand.

A job fair, also referred to commonly as a career fair or career expo, is speed dating for companies and professional job seekers. Wikipedia

In her great post on BusinessInsider, Jacquelyn Smith lists several benefits your company might get from attending job fairs, including:

You gain access to a large number of candidates in a one-stop environment. You can increase brand awareness. You have an opportunity to meet with non-traditional candidates. You can meet and network with other corporations.

How To: Finding relevant job fairs

Local business one-stop shops

Most business one-stop shops will not only help you register your company in a particular state/country, but they'll also help you with government grants and access to local job fairs.

Event websites

Eventbrite, Meetup and Facebook Events are one of the go to channels for people running job fairs. Make sure you sign up on these websites so that you can get notified immediately about such events.

Outreach Tips: Connecting with prospective candidates at job fairs

• Bring useful and original materials. Potential candidates can learn almost everything about your company with a quick Google search.
• Set up an eye-catching booth that will attract job seekers. The more job seekers you attract, the greater your talent pool will be at the end of that day.
• Don't just refer job seekers to your website. Candidates want to know that they have an "in" or a special relationship because they came to the career fair.