Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2012, in the middle of the Spanish economic crisis. Its description of job portals as the most modern option and of Sunday newspaper job ads as a standard channel reflects that period.
These are bad financial times, but fortunately some companies are doing all right and a few even need to take on new staff. There are plenty of candidates out there, so the task is to find the best one among many options. To do that, we need to attract as many candidates as possible to our job offer.
There are many ways nowadays to reach interested people and then choose the best fit for the company. The methods for finding candidates are much the same for every business; what matters is building the bridge between both sides, so that candidates can find what we are looking for. The selection process comes afterwards.
Six ways to find the best candidates
The most modern option is job portals. They have a very large pool of candidates from every field, with all kinds of education and career backgrounds, and nowadays they are the main source of applicants. Post the offer on several job portals and make it very clear what you need.
Not everything about this method is positive, though. It will bring in so many applicants that it adds the extra work of weeding out CVs that don’t interest us. So it is an option to weigh carefully, and the offer has to be very specific in order to screen out people who aren’t real candidates for the position. It may be worth looking for job portals that specialise in the profile we need, to avoid irrelevant applications.
Newspapers, especially the Sunday editions, were the traditional way to recruit in good times, and the results were satisfactory for the cost of the ad. The drawback may be choosing between limiting the ad to our own province, which excludes candidates from other regions or cities, or running it nationally, where fitting into the organisation may be harder because the candidate has to move away from home.
The most special and interesting CVs may come from business schools, and even from job fairs or the job boards of schools and universities. They know their students, their abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and the best candidates in each graduating class.
They can become part of the selection process by offering you the best matches for what the company is looking for in terms of qualifications and some of the skills the job requires.
Internal vacancies. This is the way to look for someone inside the company itself. Who’s to say we don’t already have an employee who fits the profile, knows how we work and could be useful in the role? Advertise the position internally and wait for the results.
This option works for people who already work for the company, but there is also the chance that an employee knows someone outside who would be the best professional referral for the position we need to fill.
Temporary employment agencies. Their candidate pool may give us some options. As an outsourced service, and for a fee, they also do the screening for us and leave us with a shortlist, which speeds things up and cuts the time we spend on selection.
Things to keep in mind when looking for candidates
The internet and social networks look, at first sight, like a large database for finding candidates. Sometimes, though, they are not that effective, not that reliable, and far from cheap or efficient.
No single method will reach 100% of candidates. People look for jobs in such different ways that the person we want may have gone down another path.
Analyse cost and benefit. Some options are cheaper than others, and their results vary a lot. Let’s compare the different approaches and choose the one that suits us best.
Recruitment professionals, known as headhunters, have the advantage of being more effective at selecting and screening candidates. They save the company unnecessary hours of recruiting work, and they take on responsibility for the success of the process and for the company’s image.
Featured image: Bradley Weber, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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