How To Find Employees You’ll Love in 2022

Some tried-and-true approaches can simplify the process of finding the best candidates for your open positions—whether you’re hiring for remote or in-person positions, looking for contractors or full-time employees, or needing to find someone at the last minute. Word of mouth, advertising, and job boards are just a few ways to find employees. Primarily, be honest about the role when creating your job description and ad. It’s important to include all relevant responsibilities and not just the fun stuff.

One go-to strategy for how to find employees is using a job board like ZipRecruiter. You can post a new position in minutes and share it on more than 100 other job sites. Sign up today to start posting jobs for free.

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Watch our video guide and follow along with the tips detailed below.

Tips To Find Employees Online

1. Develop Your Company’s Online Presence

Regardless of whether you’re relying on the internet to hire employees, a cohesive online presence is important. Not only will having a professional website and social media profiles help you earn the trust of your potential clients, but it will also make a positive impression on the most attractive job candidates. Consider these tips when optimizing your company’s online presence to attract high-caliber employees:

• Apply consistent branding standards across your website and social media profiles (follow key social recruiting tips).
• Complete your company profile and monitor employee reviews on employer review sites like Glassdoor.
• Keep an eye on customer feedback across sites like Google Maps and Yelp.

2. Sign Up on a Job Posting Site

While it is possible to fill positions using only social media and your company website, you’ll improve your chances of filling a role drastically by using a job posting site like ZipRecruiter. Not only does ZipRecruiter provide easy-to-use and customizable job post templates, but it also sends your listing to multiple job sites automatically in one click. Because of this increased visibility, more top-tier candidates are likely to see the job in a shorter period, making it easier for you to fill openings quickly.

Keep in mind, there are also many free options for posting your jobs online, such as Indeed, which offer applicant tracking and unlimited job posting. In addition, many of these also have paid levels that offer added features such as boosting your job ad, recruitment filters, and dedicated account managers. To learn more visit our guide to the best free job posting sites.

3. Optimize Your Job Postings

As with almost everything else, the first place people turn to when searching for a job is Google or another search engine. Because of that, you should optimize job postings so they’re more likely to land at the top of relevant search results. To ensure your company’s open positions are found by top candidates, follow these tips when writing a job description:

• Incorporate relevant keywords: Help Google find your job posting by including relevant search terms in the job title and throughout the description. Consider using the free Google Ads Keyword Planner to see which keywords you should target.
• Include the job location: If you’re using a job posting platform like ZipRecruiter, there will be a field to enter the job location. However, you should also include the city and state where the job is located in the body of the job description. This will help job seekers who enter a search term like “accounting job in Denver CO” to find your posting. If you are posting for a remote position, be sure to announce that in your job posting.
• Optimize your URL: For jobs that are posted on your company’s website, choose a webpage slug that includes the job title and the location of the role. For example, you can help a posting stand out to Google by using a slug, like: /accountant-denver-colorado/.
• Add transcripts of multimedia content: If your company incorporates videos into its job descriptions or hiring pages, make sure these scripts are also optimized for the keywords you selected. Then, include transcripts of each video on the corresponding webpage to ensure Google picks up those keywords.

4. Be Consistent

Once you post an open position—on social media, a site like ZipRecruiter, or elsewhere—take the time to review candidates consistently (daily is our recommendation). Just like you, other businesses in your industry are looking for the most qualified candidates. Failing to respond to applicants quickly can mean the difference between hiring your next great employee and losing the candidate to your competitor.

This is especially important if you have an extensive interview process—the faster you identify a promising candidate and schedule an interview, the more quickly you can fill the position.

Top Ways To Find Remote Employees

1. Choose Targeted Job Boards

Posting open roles to job boards can expose your job description to a large number of candidates—especially if you’re trying to fill a local role. But if you’re specifically trying to hire remote workers, some posting sites may fail to get your job in front of the right candidates. For that reason, it’s important to choose a job board that caters to remote employees.

ZipRecruiter offers customizable templates that make it easy to create a remote job description. Once you’ve created the job posting, ZipRecruiter supplies screening questions to use once you find your potential candidates.

A few other job boards to consider that specialize in finding remote workers are

• FlexJobs
• We Work Remotely
• JustRemote
• Remote.co

2. Accentuate Your Remote Culture

A 2020 study found that four out of five workers would reject an offer from a company with a bad reputation when searching for a new job, even if the role was otherwise perfect. While this may seem less important for remote roles, developing an appealing corporate culture is still incredibly valuable for those outside the office.

If you have a large contingent of remote employees and are proud of the efforts you’ve made in team building, training, communication, and other areas to keep them engaged, share the details on your website. Likewise, use a portion of your job description to list benefits and other perks available to remote employees.

3. Provide as Many Details as Possible

Communication is often one of the most challenging aspects of retaining remote employees and helping them succeed. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise that this can also pose challenges during the recruiting and hiring process. Overcome these hurdles by including as many details about your remote role in the job description as possible.

• Make it clear that the role is remote: When searching for remote positions, many job seekers get frustrated by unclear expectations. If the role is fully remote, state that clearly. If the job requires some travel or some in-office time, include that as well.

Other common terms for remote work include:

• Work from home
• Distributed
• Work from anywhere
• Virtual
• Mention required meetings: Many people choose remote work because of the flexibility it affords them. For that reason, it’s helpful to clearly state whether remote employees are expected to attend scheduled meetings and, if so, how many each week. This will help potential applicants decide whether the role is a good fit for their lifestyle.
• Describe technology requirements: If your job opening requires an employee to have access to specific equipment or a minimum internet speed, now is the time to mention it. Likewise, if your company will provide the necessary equipment, include that in the description as well.
• Outline the hiring process: Depending on the role, the hiring process for a remote position may be more extensive than for a traditional office job. If your company requires multiple stages of interviews—or a test project—make sure to spell this out in the job posting.

4. Stay Competitive

In the wake of COVID-19, more companies have turned to remote work. This is great news for employees who prefer to work from home, but it means that companies need to be more competitive. To improve your chances of finding qualified, enthusiastic remote employees, make sure your salary and benefits packages are on a par with industry standards. You’ll also have more luck hiring remote candidates if you can demonstrate how your company makes remote employment a rewarding, diverse, and enjoyable experience for its employees.

How To Find Hourly Employees

1. Try a Staffing Agency

Depending on how many hourly employees you need to hire—and how frequently—the recruiting process can take up a huge amount of time and resources. Staffing (or temp) agencies can simplify recruiting for hourly employees by identifying candidates, hiring new employees, and—in some cases—managing benefits and payments. What’s more, staffing agencies often specialize in specific industries, so find a company that’s familiar with the type of employees you need.

2. Advertise Locally

If you need hourly employees who can work flexible schedules, you likely want someone who lives locally. In this case, traditional job posting websites may not be necessary. Instead, consider using a more grassroots approach to hiring. Try posting your job on local job boards, Facebook Groups, or websites like Craigslist. It may also be worth it to attend job fairs or other recruiting events to meet locals looking for consistent hourly opportunities.

3. Build Relationships With Local Schools

For small businesses interested in hiring interns or contractors with specific skills or interests, local colleges and universities are a great place to start the recruiting process. Not only can you find candidates who are interested in your industry, but college students may also be more open to hourly employment than other highly qualified workers.

This form of recruiting is also a great way to build relationships with top-caliber candidates who will soon be entering the workforce. By hiring top students as interns, you’re more likely to keep them on as full-time employees in a competitive market—saving you time and hiring costs down the road.

4. Post a Help Wanted Sign

The most direct way to find hourly workers is to advertise directly at your business that you are hiring. A Help Wanted sign in your business window lets locals know you are hiring. This can draw potential candidates who visit or come near your business or by word of mouth through people who have seen your sign.

Quickest Ways To Find Replacement Employees

1. Choose an Efficient Applicant Tracking System

The hiring process can be time-consuming under the best conditions, but it’s even more so if you don’t have a system for organizing and tracking applicants. To streamline—and speed up—the hiring process, choose an applicant tracking system (ATS). These platforms can help you hire employees more quickly (which is often important when replacing key employees) by providing job description templates, candidate management pipelines, and resume parsing features.

2. Network, Network, Network

One of the keys to successful hiring is to never stop recruiting. Business owners and hiring managers who only look for employees when they’re hiring often find themselves with a limited pool of applicants—especially if they’re in a hurry. If instead, you’ve cultivated a robust network of high performers in your industry, you’ll always have a strong starting point when filling an open role.

3. Ask for Referrals

The traditional recruiting process can be long and frustrating. If you’re in a hurry, you may not have time to pore over hundreds of applications to find a few qualified candidates. One way to condense this process is to ask your current employees for referrals. Not only can they tap into a larger network of potential hires quickly, but your employees also are already familiar with the company culture and can identify candidates who are a good fit.

4. Request Applicant Feedback

If you have the type of business that frequently needs to hire employees quickly due to high turnover or other reasons, such as restaurants and retailers, take the time to find out which job postings are getting the most attention. To do this, ask applicants where they saw your job posting. If you want additional insight, you can also ask why the job description stood out to them and made them want to apply.

Applicants may not always be willing to provide this information, but it can provide valuable insight into which recruiting strategies are working. Once you know that, it will become easier to speed up the hiring process and bring on new employees faster.

Bottom Line

Employees are the backbone of every small business, so it’s incredibly important to find team members who are both qualified and a good culture fit for your company. Depending on your needs—and the hiring climate—this can be difficult to accomplish.

If you’re struggling to find qualified candidates and want to get your job posting on more than 100 job sites and social networks, ZipRecruiter can save you time and frustration. You can try the platform for free and then choose the combination of recruiting tools that most closely fit your needs.

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