Finding the Perfect Candidates: Top 20 Ways

Finding the perfect candidates can be time-consuming. However, knowing the various search methods can simplify the recruitment process and help to find real professionals who will ideally suit the company’s requirements.This article by recruiters will look at the top 20 ways to find the perfect candidates, helping you find the best employees for your business.

How to make a Portrait of a candidate

The concept of a “candidate portrait” is an image of an ideal employee conceived by a recruiter. This term is associated with a similar term marketers use – a portrait of a buyer or client. With its help, companies determine their target audience and develop a sales strategy. This tool helps HR specialists focus on finding the right employee. The process uses industry research data, statistics, trends of recent years and unofficial information.

It is not enough to pay attention only to the candidate’s resume, experience, and competencies. To bring out the elements of a candidate’s portrait, you need to feel the team’s values and spirit.

One of the significant advantages of a well-designed candidate portrait is the opportunity to look at the vacancy through the eyes of a potential applicant. This allows you to understand the candidate’s desires accurately, determine where to find him and establish contact with him.

The process of drawing up a portrait of a candidate can be presented step by step:

Step 1. Data collection

Fact-checking will help with this. Abandon patterns and assumptions and pay attention to the facts. Analyzing the facts will make it possible to create a successful portrait of the candidate. It is necessary to explore examples of successful hiring of specialists who have already been hired and are working successfully and to study their resumes.

Step 2. Determining the qualities of the candidate

At this stage, you need to ask colleagues about the qualities of successfully employed specialists and find out which leads to successful hiring.

You can also ask professionals already in the required position about what qualities help them in their work.

Based on these data, it is possible to deduce the general qualities of the candidate.

Step 3. Final portrait modelling

When finalising a candidate’s portrait, remember that you are making up a portrait, not a job description. Do not overestimate the requirements because the candidate must be a real person and not a figment of fantasy. If the requirements are too high, the search may not be successful.

Why is this necessary?

Every recruiter has a portrait of the ideal candidate in his or her head. The right choice would be to transfer this portrait to paper. Put your ideas in writing, systematise and expand them, set minimum and maximum requirements—so the process of finding the perfect candidate will become clearer and easier.

What exactly creating a portrait of a candidate will help you with:

Create job texts that are understandable to candidates and employers.
Close vacancies for brands.
Work with passive candidates.
Keep statistics on successful candidate search and recruitment.

You can create an “itinerary” for yourself to find a suitable candidate, in which you list the requirements for the candidate and how to find him. You can write to the checklist:

Soft skills of the candidate. List the desired personal characteristics.
The candidate’s hard skills. List the required set of professional skills.
What motivation a candidate should have. What attracts him to work with your company?
The range of search for suitable candidates: where to look, through whom you can get the candidate’s contacts.

Define the requirements for the candidate

Before starting the search for a candidate, you need to make a list of his requirements. It’s like a marketing sales funnel when narrowing the search for customers. This way, it is possible to focus on candidates who meet the specified requirements.

How can adequate requirements be determined? We hope that our tips will help you:

Specify what tasks are assigned to the employee.
Analyse what tasks successful employees already working in a similar position are solving.
Get acquainted with job descriptions, professional standards, and qualification requirements if you don’t quite understand what a particular candidate should know and be able to do.

What to include in the requirements for the candidate

Usually, the requirements for candidates include:

Competencies.
Work experience.
Qualities that are necessary for successful work in the company.
Depending on the company and the vacancy, among the requirements may be a certain education or an area of economics in which experience is needed.

Requirements for the gender and age of candidates are considered discriminatory and can lead to negativity from potential candidates and interest from regulatory authorities.

Search sources

There are many sources of searching for the ideal candidate. There is no need to focus only on specific sources and be afraid to try new ways to find candidates. Let’s look at the top 20 possible sources for finding ideal candidates.

1.A career website or a section on the website with vacancies

Career websites and job sections on company websites allow you to promote a company among candidates as an employer.

It is recommended that candidates transition from the vacancy announcement to the company’s career website. Also, some candidates turn directly to the websites of the companies they are interested in and look for a section with vacancies there.

To ensure that only suitable candidates come to you, we recommend that you pay attention to the content and design of a career website or a section with vacancies on the company’s website. On such a site, the candidate should have the opportunity to:

To feel the corporate culture of the company and its values.
Understand the prospects of working in this company.
Learn about the history of the company and its leaders.

On a career website, you can implement a representation of your HR brand and organise its SEO promotion so that when searching through a browser, your career website appears on the first page of the search results.

2.Posting vacancies on social networks

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Telegram, Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki, and other available social networks provide a good response. Each social network has job search communities where you can post your vacancies and wait for feedback from candidates.

3.Direct access to candidates

Sometimes, it is optimal to reach out to the environment of a suitable candidate on social networks or write directly to the candidate. A direct question can lead to the correct answer for the recruit. It is possible that the candidate himself is not engaged in job monitoring, but you can make him a tempting offer through his entourage or directly.

4.E-mail marketing (mass mailing)

This way of finding the perfect candidate is suitable when you have a large base, and you know your target audience. For broader coverage, you can partner with a company with a similar target audience and make mailings using each other’s databases.

In such a newsletter, you can informally describe the pros and cons of your vacancy. The benefit of mailing lists is the ability to collect statistics, optimise the mailing list and improve its effectiveness.

5.Be active on your social media pages and messengers

Publishing interesting posts on behalf of the brand, benefits, and analytics helps to convey to subscribers that the company is expanding and is open to cooperation. Describing the projects and cases of your employees will help to involve people. If the company becomes interesting and more understandable for candidates, they will want to come even for less money.

6.Contextual advertising

Contextual advertising refers to advertising on the Internet when an ad is displayed in accordance with the context of a page on the Internet: content, audience, place, and time. Contextual advertising is configured according to these parameters so that when candidates search for their broad queries in the browser, the ad appears in the output.

7.Targeted advertising

Targeting is the definition of a target audience for a particular ad and launching it to that audience. The targeted advertising settings indicate the target audience’s characteristics for a particular vacancy. Unlike contextual advertising for targeting on social networks, we do not choose pages for displaying vacancies but the attributes of those users of social networks who will see this ad. Social networks themselves offer sets of user characteristics to launch targeted advertising.

8.Old resumes

There are probably a lot of old resumes in the archives. You can contact, call and write to messengers with these people. They can recommend someone even if they are not looking for a job.

9. Employee recommendations

Already hired employees can be financially rewarded for the recommendations of successfully hired candidates after they have passed the probation period. You can also seek recommendations from former candidates who are already employed and with whom contact has been established.

10. Recruiting at specialised and other events

The search for candidates for specific positions can be successful at events of various professional communities and business events. Such events are usually attended by specialists who want professional development, are looking for professional connections among colleagues, and have new opportunities to apply their skills. That is, such professionals may be interested in career development not only in the company where they are employed.

11.Professional and near-professional thematic forums

Professional forums on social networks, messengers, and professional websites often exist. There, you can even track the activity and competencies of the participants, including their ability to express their thoughts and be convinced of their rightness. Thanks to contextual advertising, forums of the right specialists are not challenging to find.

12.Blogs of experts and opinion leaders

Company employees’ blogs on social networks may be suitable for messages to potential candidates who are not actively looking for a new job. In addition, you can arrange with bloggers with a suitable target audience to publish an appropriate convention to increase loyalty to the company and search for suitable candidates.

13.Contact a recruitment agency

Choose a reputable agency that will find you the perfect candidate. A genuinely professional agency will help you create a job description, conduct an interview, and conduct a high-quality selection of candidates.

14. Freelance exchanges

When your tasks for a candidate do not involve permanent employment, you can hire a freelancer. Exchanges usually look for specialists who can work remotely and have a suitable portfolio.

When hiring a freelancer through the exchange, you can save time and money on hiring an employee and paying for labour. However, there is a risk of attracting an unreliable contractor who abandons the project halfway or refuses to complete it.

15. Labour exchange

Belarusian employers must submit information about vacancies to the labour exchange within 5 days. This is how the Republican Job Bank is formed. Candidates can contact the employer using the contact information indicated in the vacancy announcement.

Also, the Republican Bank of Vacancies has a database of specialists who are registered there as unemployed. The recruiter may contact such people. They may be interested in your offer.

16.Educational institutions

Students are often interested in working for internships and gaining the necessary experience. They are energetic, interested in new things, and not demanding the amount of remuneration. When a company wants to grow staff “for itself,” it makes sense to cooperate with educational institutions. To do this, you need to be interested in career events held by academic institutions, present your company there, invite interested students for internships, and ask for teacher recommendations.

17.Use chatbots to communicate with candidates

The advantage of chatbots is that they can be placed on almost any online platform. At the same time, communication with the candidate begins immediately – you do not need to wait for the recruiter to answer the call or return from a coffee break. The chatbot asks the same questions as the recruiter, but the company saves resources because it does not need to involve a live specialist.

18.Make a video about hiring / Create a website or a recruiting page

An excellent solution for attracting candidates is videos created by company employees for social networks. The company can manage with minimal investments to shoot and promote video content containing the employer’s message. Such videos involve employees and create a positive company image for candidates.

Creating a recruiting website for companies that require a lot of staff makes sense. The company’s values and corporate culture are visualised on the site, and vacancies are posted.

A properly completed company website usually contains information about the company’s executives, areas of work, mission, and values. The recruitment page on such a site allows candidates who want to work in this particular company to fill out an application for a vacancy without going to the job aggregator site.

19.Encourage the return of former employees

Of course, you need to consider the circumstances of the employee’s departure. In general, the company receives several advantages when returning former employees:

There is no need to spend resources on adapting such an employee.
The effectiveness of such an employee will usually be high from the beginning.
As a rule, the company and the employee have a certain level of trust, so it is clear what tasks can be assigned to the employee.
The return of former employees contributes to a positive image of the company in the employment market.

20.Don’t be afraid of new formats

You can try a creative approach to finding candidates. A video with a survey of employees about their love for their work, which makes it clear that the company’s employees are not among the overwhelming number of employees who do not like their work, can show the peculiarities of the corporate culture in the company and even go viral.

Creating a resume bank for candidates who, for various reasons, did not apply for vacancies after the interview and maintaining contact with these candidates will increase their loyalty. You can send them job offers so they are the first to find out about possible employment in your company. This will help employ candidates interested in working in your company.

OUR EXPERIENCE

Choosing the right recruitment agency is vital in an effective recruitment process. Recruitment.by having successful experience hiring professionals and top management for companies in various industries and specialisations. Our company has an excellent reputation and stable partnerships.

We guarantee that if the candidate we select fails to complete the probation period or leaves during this period, we will provide a replacement at no additional cost.

We have extensive contacts and experience in recruitment and will help you find the ideal candidates who fully meet your needs. Our database includes more than 1,500 candidates who are ready to consider new offers.