Help Wanted: How to Optimize Your Hiring Strategy

Sage Anderson
·6 min read

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Whether you’re a small business owner, or an established hiring manager, everyone can benefit from streamlining their current hiring process. As part of running a successful company, hiring new talent can be more complicated than just conducting interviews and reading through stacks of resumes. Without you knowing even it, you could be falling into the pitfalls of some common recruiting mistakes — but the good news is it’s pretty easy to get your recruiting strategy back on track.

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The best way to optimize your hiring strategy is to focus on attracting (and retaining) high-quality employees through a variety of avenues that you know will match your brand. If you find you’re not getting too many nibbles after throwing out a line, it could be due to a poorly-crafted job description, lack of company communication on social media, or that your screening process is too strict, weeding out good potential candidates you may not have even considered.

Already got a hiring practice in place? These five tips will help you enhance your recruiting process to better serve you business, find you the best employees possible fast, and save you precious time.

1. Post to Multiple Job Sites

To find the most qualified candidates, make it easier on yourself and find employees online by posting job descriptions on multiple sites at once sites. No only are most job board sites free for job seekers (which incentivizes them apply), many job search sites offer premium services on the business end that you can use to filter for the necessary qualifications and have a resume database at your fingertips to find the right candidate. Some of the best places to find employees online include:

  • ZipRecruiter

  • Indeed

  • Glassdoor

  • Handshake

  • Monster

  • CareerBuilder

  • SimplyHired

  • Ladders

There are hundreds of sites to choose from, but you’ll have to consider whether you want a site that lets you post job listings for free, or provides some more tools you can use to track applicants and help recruit faster through specialized paid services. Consider whether you want a volume of postings, or a specific way to track and filter for quality candidates.

We like ZipRecruiter thanks to their powerful matching algorithm and AI technology to create instant matches between your listings and the right candidates. Using information about a job seeker’s skills (such as education, skills, and experience), it can connect all kinds of businesses with millions of potential employees currently on the web through their browser site, mobile app, and email program.

There’s two plans available, a Standard and Premium job listing plan. While they don’t list their official pricing online, the Standard plan is for more budget-friendly hiring, and will give you distribution to 100+ job sites, unlimited candidate applications, and one reusable job slot. Before you starting looking over your qualified candidates, you can always try this #1 rated hiring site free with ZipRecruiter’s free trial plan.

2. Write Better Job Descriptions

Optimizing your job descriptions with keywords and phrases is important not only so that your listing will show up on the relevant online searches, but so your posting will be seen by as many relevant candidates as possible. While you may think that going broad in your job title and description will yield higher views, it pays to be specific in key areas of the listing so that only job seekers with the most relevant experience in their field will apply.

One way to do this is to go general in the job title, such as “Sales Manager” instead of “Retail Sales Expert,” but get specific in the actual description itself in terms of job-related duties, necessary skill sets, and tools. Check to see if your job posting site has customizable templates to help with this.

3. Have a Comprehensive Candidate Screening Process

When you need to hire fast, searching for qualified candidates can be time-consuming — unless you have the right system in place. Building up a comprehensive candidate screening process will help you keep information such as resumes, relevant experience, and contact details organized. Not only that, but you can track and reach out to specific candidates you want to interview instead of waiting for them to apply to your specific listings.

ZipRecruiter does this well, with a smart, easy-to-use dashboard that helps you sort, review, and rate the candidates you’ve received. It also intelligently learns from your ratings and sends you similar applicants to the ones you liked. Their “Invite to Apply” tool also finds the best candidates for open roles before they even apply, showing past employers’ detailed information about the candidate. This includes experience, education, veteran status, certifications, and a rating indicating how strong a match they are for the role.

4. Leverage Social Media for Recruiting

Social media is actually where a good chunk of job seekers hear about job openings nowadays, so you’ll want to utilize it well in combination with a job board site to find the best candidates. Make sure to post current job openings on your social media feeds, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and link out to your company’s page for applications.

Having a tougher-than-average-to-fill position? In the post-pandemic market, it’s bound to happen eventually. You can narrow your search for the most relevant candidates by joining specific professional groups for your field or area of interest on Facebook and Twitter to post your job listings, or using targeted hashtags such as #journalismjobs or #nycjobs.

There are also tools, like ZipRecruiter‘s “TrafficBoost,” that give your job posting a little extra boost, including increased placement and visibility across their linked job boards. TrafficBoost helps secure more eyeballs, too, since the tool will promote the position until it receives the number of views you’re aiming for (100-300 views per post), or for up to 30 days.

5. Plan to Meet Potential Candidates Offline

Don’t count out in-person networking from your candidate search — most U.S. colleges and universities have career events that you can set up an informational booth at, or you can partner with local organizations that help unemployed folks get in touch with businesses that are currently hiring. Not only will you find unexpectedly qualified candidates, it helps improve brand recognition for your business.

Contact your local university or non-profit to see what kind of partnership you can strike up, or even go old school and see if any college career services host events, talks, or career fairs that you can participate in, alongside maintaining you online presence.

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