The current job market is increasingly becoming competitive. Although this means that the talent pool is now larger than ever before, this extra tough battlefield is also making it much harder for hiring professionals to find the best talent for their job vacancies.
After all, you’re not just competing with companies in your area. With virtual hiring and remote hiring, you’re pretty much competing with the rest of the world.
Concerned that the best workers have already been taken? Don’t worry. In this article, we’ll help you take this competitive journey towards finding and getting the best hires for your company.
Surprising Places to Find the Best Hires in 2022
We already know the most common avenues for hiring workers in today’s modern age, but what you probably don’t know is that job hiring goes way beyond the traditional methods like job boards and job fairs.
Nowadays, there are plenty more avenues that you should explore if you want to find the best talent for the job. Here are eight surprising places to find the best hires in 2022.
1. Company Website
It’s genuinely surprising how so many companies don’t realize the power of their own website.
In fact, many companies, especially traditional ones, seem to even forget their website’s existence. We’re talking bad UI, outdated information, and low-quality designs by today’s standards.
Keep in mind, if you have a company website, it’s one of the most practical methods you can use to attract the best talent. Not only is it a great way to find high-quality candidates, but it’s also a fantastic way of finding candidates who already like and look up to your company.
Think about it from a potential candidate’s perspective. A company catches your attention and you decide to look them up online. Their company website looks polished, modern, and sleek. They even have a dedicated page showing their employees and how much they are valued.
As you continue to browse the site, something else catches your eye: a page called Careers. You click it, and there’s a job vacancy for something that suits your skills and credentials.
Any candidate would be interested to check out your job vacancy after browsing through a site like that. And if it all works out, you can be sure that this candidate is someone who’s not just proud to be part of your team, but also honored to have gotten the opportunity to be there.
If this sounds like something appealing to you, the first step is to ensure that your company website is updated at all times. The UI should be smooth, easy-to-use, and responsive, and the site itself should be eye-catching in a good way. Coordinate with the relevant departments if possible to make this happen.
Next, having a Careers or Jobs page that lists down all available job vacancies is also ideal. This allows visitors and aspiring applicants to send in their applications easily if they like the job and think they’re suitable for it.
Lastly, be sure to post blogs or other informative and engaging content every once in a while. Not only is this a way to connect with your candidates, consumers, and even clients, it’s also a good way to get search engines to pick up your job posts and show them to more people.
2. Existing Employees
If you’re looking for a new person to fill a higher position within your company, consider taking a look at your existing employee list.
There are many benefits to doing this. The first one is that there’s a big chance that your existing employees already know the company from inside and out. This means that you won’t have to waste time training them on how to do their job, let alone how to navigate your workplace.
Remember, lost time means lost money, so if you can reduce the time needed for further training that won’t directly affect their job, you’re saving resources that you can use for other, perhaps more important, things.
Two, hiring from within the company is a great way to maintain employee loyalty. Your employees will feel much safer and more secure in your company if they know that there’s a chance that they can climb up the proverbial ladder someday.
Think about it. If you’re an employee working in a company for 10 years yet you’ve never been promoted because HR keeps bringing new people from outside the company, how would you feel?
By choosing to promote your existing employees instead of hiring from outside, you’re basically telling them that if they sow the seeds of hard work and do well, they’ll reap the benefits someday. And of course, any company that knows how to reward its employees for a job well done is a company worth working for.
3. Employee Referrals
If there are no existing employees available for promotion or for internal hiring, you can try asking them for referrals.
There’s a big chance that at least one person knows someone who’s looking for a job, and that person may be a good fit for the position that your company is hiring for. As walking and talking advertisements for your company, your employees are actually great messengers for spreading the word about job vacancies within the company.
You can even offer incentives to make your employees more willing to participate in the recruitment efforts.
One way to do this would be to implement a point-based system, where the employees with the most points will receive a prize, as well as consolation prizes to anyone else who participates.
One point will be given for each referral, and another point will be given for each stage in the recruitment process that their referrals manage to reach. Obviously, the employee with the highest number of qualified referrals will win.
Another method is to offer a bonus to the employee whose referral ultimately gets hired. This makes the competition between the employees much tighter, which will also make them make more effort in finding the best person to refer.
4. Social Media
Social media is so prevalent these days that it’s almost impossible to find someone who’s not on any kind of social media platform whatsoever.
It doesn’t matter if it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or any other platform out there – if you’re not utilizing social media in your recruitment efforts, you’re missing out on a whole lot of value.
Social media is a great way to not just see how someone is like professionally, but also personally.
Through someone’s posts and pictures, you get a hint of what they’re like as a person, outside of the work environment. You also get a peek at their hobbies, their interests, their ideals, even their personal beliefs.
You’ll also be able to evaluate their soft skills. Although hard skills are also crucial, the importance of soft skills is now starting to become more and more highlighted in this modern mind.
After all, hard skills can be taught, but soft skills, especially those related to one’s personality, are things that should ideally come naturally in a potential hire.
Aside from this, social media is also a fantastic way to find passive job seekers. Passive job seekers are people who may already have a job but don’t mind moving to something better. These people may have the perfect qualifications and skills, but you’ll never find them if you only look on traditional job boards.
5. Online Forums
If you’re hiring for a specific or niche role, your best bet would be to hire on online forums where your potential candidates would be flocking.
For instance, if you’re looking for someone who’s an expert in PC building, the best place to advertise would be on forums about PC building. If you’re looking for a talented jazz music composer, you should browse forums about music compositions. There’s bound to be someone there who’s interested in the job, or who knows someone else who would be interested.
That said, take note that this method works best if you’re hiring for a remote role, like a writer, an editor, a musician, an artist, a coder, and other similar positions.
If you’re hiring for an in-person role, however, this method may be a bit trickier. You first have to find a forum frequented by people in your area, and then find a specific subforum for the niche you’re looking for.
6. Conventions and Seminars
As mentioned above, online forums may not be a very convenient method if you’re hiring for an in-person role. What if you do find someone but it turns out that they live a couple of states away from you?
A good alternative is to attend conventions and seminars in your area related to the niche you’re hiring for. Just like the previous point, it’s easier to look for people interested in your job vacancy if you’re right at their place of interest.
This is especially true for in-person niche roles. Although you can technically hire through online means, it would be much easier if you know that they can at least access your area – which is the case if you’re attending a local convention or seminar.
7. Internship Programs
If your company accepts interns, you can use the program to your advantage when finding a new employee.
After all, interns tend to receive some kind of training in order to work within the company, even for just a while. It doesn’t always have to be in-depth training – the mere fact that they already went through a process to join the company means that it’s going to be much easier for you to simply absorb them and turn them into regular employees. They probably already know the layout of your office, who they need to go to if they have specific questions, and even where the file cabinets area.
Most interns go through a watered-down version of an onboarding process, which is similar to the actual onboarding that existing employees went through. If you do hire one of them, that means you won’t have to spend a long time onboarding them again.
Plus, having interns means that you can easily pick and choose who to hire just by observing them in their daily roles. The competition is much tougher for interns vying for a permanent spot, and this can be advantageous to you because you’ll see who does a standout job.
8. Schools
If you’re hiring for an entry-level job, perhaps one of the most surprising places to find the best hires is in your local schools.
Just think: accepting fresh grads already opens you up to a whole new world of potential applicants since most companies prefer those with experience. If you don’t need expertise and just need someone to do basic office work or assistant work, a fresh graduate can do the job.
This also works if you’re hiring for non-office work. For instance, culinary school graduates can be hired to prepare simple dishes, or they can help the chefs with more complex ones. Young architects or engineers can work alongside more experienced professionals to provide a fresh take on design. The list goes on.
Finding the Best Hires in 2022: Final Thoughts
As you can see, you don’t have to limit your applicant search to just the usual avenues. Traditional job boards may be great, but if you’re not using other platforms or ways, you’re certainly missing out.
For one, you won’t be able to find passive jobseekers who may already have a job but are still open to something better. You might not notice your employee’s acquaintance who actually fits the role perfectly. You’re also going to miss out on fresh graduates who have a lot to offer and still more room to grow.
If you want to find the best hires, you need to expand your view and broaden your horizons.
