Dear hiring managers, one of the important roles you might have is hiring, to identify and recruit top talent for your organization. However, we all know that this can be an extremely challenging task, as it requires you to be proactive in seeking out qualified candidates and convincing them to join your company. Prospecting for good candidates can be a time-consuming task, not to mention a costly one.
Nevertheless in this piece, we’ll lay out some ideas for you in prospecting for candidates using free and menial methods, and how to best increase your chances of success to get the right hire you so badly need.
1. Outreach to Candidates on Relevant Sites
This strategy involves using websites and platforms that are relevant to your industry or job position, you can target your search to find candidates who have the skills and experience you are looking for. This contrasts a more general job posting, where oftentimes you might get tons of applications that are of lower quality or remotely matched to your desired talent.
Example: You are hiring for a technical role, you can consider reaching out to candidates via Stack Overflow, GitHub, or DEV. Get their contact information, and outreach to them. Then, wait for responses from these targeted outreaches.
Of course with you manually doing the outreach, it might still be time-consuming. Not all candidates may be interested in your job opportunity or are ready to make a move. This can lead to a low response rate and make it difficult to find qualified candidates. Many people might also be caught in the process of finding the “perfect” candidates before they get into the action of actually contacting them.
This then will backfire because what if those “perfect” candidates do not respond to your outreach in the end?
Have you then wasted time finding these much smaller group of “perfect” candidates and missing out on a larger group out there that could increase your chances of success?
The key for this first method then is wider outreach when you were just getting started in the hiring process, to contact as many relevant candidates as possible. This will then shift the importance to you being able to find the relevant sites for your outreach.
You can very well engage in the 4 methods suggested above for your hiring process. Yet by now, you would have seen that these methods are menial, time-consuming, uncertain, albeit free. If you are only hiring for 1 role in a long period, these methods still can tide you through relatively well. However, if you are looking to hire regularly for more roles, you could better make use of your time and efforts using other techniques.