How to find good candidates for your business

Whether you have a dedicated HR team or not, hiring the best people is essential if you want to thrive. But where should you start to find the candidates to build and expand your team?

There’s much to keep in mind if you want to maximise your chances of finding the perfect candidates for the roles your company needs to fill. Read on to learn more!

• Start with a great job ad
• Show off your benefits
• Promote your job ads to help candidates find you
• Include social media recruiting in your strategy
• Use an ATS to avoid candidate dropout
• Set up a careers page to earn candidates’ trust

Start with a great job ad

If you want to find great candidates, you’re going to need a great job ad. Just scribbling down all the job responsibilities and requirements you can think of and throwing it onto one job board isn’t going to cut it.

Use a specific job title to help get the attention of the candidates you want to apply. Follow it up with a job description and specification that summarises what the candidate can expect in this job. Resist the temptation to list everything you can think of, as this will be off-putting. Instead, stick to the 3-5 most important duties.

Also read: How to attract the best talent in 2024

Make sure that your job ad includes information on location, salary, and experience level. Good candidates use filtered search criteria when looking for jobs, and if your ad doesn’t include this info you run the risk of your ad being filtered out before your candidates even see it. According to our own surveys, 37% of candidates who said they weren’t interested in a job ad said it was because salary information wasn’t included.

If you want to know how to write a job ad that will bring in the candidates you want, then you’ll find everything you need in our guide to writing great job ads.

Created with ease in 5 minutes

Find the right talent with perfect job ads

Sign up – it’s free

Show off your benefits

A common mistake companies make when recruiting is to not include any information about benefits in their job ad, or to place this information at the very end.

When competing for great candidates, it’s a good idea to show off this information early, as candidates will stop scrolling and take a look at what you’re offering. This is a particularly good strategy if you’re a smaller company that can’t necessarily compete on salary with bigger rivals.

Special benefits could include:

• Flexible working hours
• Language lessons for international employees
• Hybrid working
• Soft or hard skills training

If you’d like more ideas on what you could offer your employees, take a look at our article on the best employee benefits.

Promote your job ads to help candidates find you

Now that you have your perfectly crafted job ad, it’s time to send it out into the world. But how can you maximise its chances of being found by the right candidates? By multiposting it to the right selection of job boards.

Posting your job ad to the biggest job boards like Indeed or LinkedIn is a good start, but there are a lot of other job boards out there, including some that target certain industries and countries. Niche job boards let you put your ad in front of a preselected audience of qualified candidates, and so can give you better value for your recruitment budget.

With so many job boards to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start. For starters, you can check out our full list of the best job boards for 2024.

In the JOIN store, you can filter job boards so we only show you the ones for your region. We can also tell you their target audience and reach, so you can make an informed decision.

We’ve also compiled bundles that group job boards together under a shared category (“Startups”, “Healthcare”, “IT”, “Remote”), so you can quickly find the set of job boards that’s perfect for you.

You can save even more time with our Smart Spend feature. Our hiring experts use performance data from thousands of premium job ads to set up a strategy that spends your budget where it will do the most. Save time and spend your budget efficiently.

Need more inspiration? Take a look at how other successful companies are promoting their job ads with JOIN.

Include social media recruiting in your strategy

When you’re trying to spread the word about your job opening, don’t just rely on job boards. Did you know that 79% of job seekers are likely to use social media when looking for a job? Or that this number goes up to 86% for young job seekers? If you aren’t promoting your job ad on social media, you risk missing out.

Social media is an especially useful tool for attracting passive candidates. They may be interested in a new role but not actively looking, and will come across your job ad through their regular social media use.

If you want to learn more, read our article about the benefits of social media recruiting, and how to integrate it.

Use an ATS to avoid candidate dropout

The best candidates will often be applying and interviewing for other roles with other companies. If your recruitment process is slow because you have too many stages, or take too long to respond to candidates, there’s a good chance your perfect hire will have been snapped up by the competition.

How can you prevent this? By using a good applicant tracking system (ATS) to move candidates through your hiring pipeline as efficiently as possible. With JOIN, you can screen, manage, and engage your candidates all in one place, and even share notes with the rest of your team.

It's fast, easy, and free with JOIN

Need to post a job ad for free?

Sign up – it’s free

Set up a careers page to earn candidates’ trust

Even if you’re using job boards and social media to promote your job ad, it’s a good idea to maintain a careers page on your company’s website. This helps to maintain your employer branding, shows off the benefits and company culture, and builds a sense of trust.

If that sounds like a lot of extra work, it shouldn’t. Simply embed the JOIN job widget onto your website, and when you update your job ads through JOIN, we’ll update your careers page automatically!

With the JOIN widget doing the hard work, setting up a careers page is well worth your time. Find out more with our article on five good reasons to use the JOIN Job Widget.