The 4 Ways to Find Applicants

In order to find candidates, you end up doing four things. These are the main hiring platforms and channels most teams rely on today.

1. Hiring 3rd party staffing firms to cold call and persuade people to interview with you.
2. Promote your open jobs on places like Indeed.com.
3. If you’re lucky you find someone by word of mouth.
4. Use Vibbn to get a dedicated career site so candidates can apply directly from your company website.

1. Staffing Firms

Staffing firms are the most expensive, and also the slowest, way to hire.

Imagine that you’ve worked internally, and wrote up a description of the open role, and sent it to several of the staffing firms you work with.

You really needed to have someone on-boarded yesterday, so you’re forced to wait for the staffing firm to bring you candidates.

The staffing firm is incentivized to just get you to hire the first person they bring. Unfortunately they don’t always find the best candidates.

You need the best person for the job. When you rely on staffing firms, your candidate pool isn’t as big as it could be.

A smaller candidate pool means a smaller chance of finding the best person for the job.

Plus, if you end up hiring an employee through a staffing firm, you typically pay between 10% and 20% of your new hire’s first year salary to the staffing firm as their commission fee.

For a new hire that gets $100K per year in salary, you end up spending $10K–$20K on the staffing firm that found your new employee.

2. Job Boards

While staffing firms sometimes bring good candidates, they don’t always.

So, you’ll also promote the opening on Indeed or other jobs boards.

When you promote on these websites, you’ll often spend between $20 to $50 per day.

That means an additional expense of between $600 and $1500 per month just to source potential applicants from job boards.

The problem with job boards is that those candidates are not as serious nor as interested in working for your company as those people who already know about your business and go directly to your company website.

When you use job boards, you end up with a lower quality talent pipeline. These people are more likely to turnover, and less likely to be the best person for the job.

Plus, consider your time to hire:

On average, it takes companies between 1 to 3 months to find, interview, and hire a new employee, though it can be closer to 3–6 months for specialized roles.

Depending on how long it takes you to fill an open role, you may spend anywhere from $600 to $9000 to promote your openings on job boards alone, just to hire one person.

3. Word of Mouth / Referrals

By far the best way to find candidates is by word of mouth or by referrals.

As you have likely experienced, word of mouth and referrals is often the best way to find good quality job candidates.

Sometimes you get lucky, and you can find someone this way.

If you do, Excellent!

However, it’s not a repeatable nor scalable process.

You can’t just rely on recruiting by word of mouth. You need a more modern and scalable approach.

4. Applicant Tracking Systems – Dedicated Career Site

So far we’ve spoken about three ways you might find job candidates.

There’s a 4th way to find candidates that is sometimes overlooked by businesses with under about half a billion in revenue.

Believe it or not, this 4th way is by simply enabling people to apply directly from your company website.

By getting a dedicated career website, you can post your open jobs, and candidates can apply directly.

You can see a list of candidates, quickly review their resume or LinkedIn profile, and then call or email them directly to set up next steps, and finally use a clean and simple “Recruiting Dashboard” to track where each candidate is in the process.

Why does a dedicated career site work? Your company has already built a well-known brand in the industry.

Your company website is an extremely valuable resource because people already visit your company website.

By simply adding a list of your open jobs and a short job application form, you’ll quickly find people who are already interested in working for you.

It’s even possible to get this setup in under 3 days.

From our case studies, between 25% and 33% of web visitors to a business’s website tend to be people who are interested in finding open jobs, and applying.

A simple glance at your website’s analytics will tell you how many people visit your company website today.

Even if you only have 1000 monthly visitors to your company website, you have the potential to recruit tens or hundreds of additional high quality candidates.

When you recruit from your own website, you can reduce the cost associated with Indeed promotions as well as commissions to staffing firms.

With an applicant tracking system (ATS) and candidate tracking software like Vibbn, your careers website effectively becomes recruitment management software that keeps every applicant organized in one place.