Recruiters need to work efficiently and quickly.
A recruiter’s mission is to fill job orders by sourcing candidates. How do recruiters find candidates? By using various methods to identify potential candidates that fit the job requirements.
Introduction: What is a Recruiter and How Do They Work?
Recruiters are the people who find and hire new employees for a company. They are responsible for approaching, interviewing, and hiring candidates. Recruiters work on behalf of the employer to find the best possible person for a position.
What do they do?
The main responsibility of recruiters is to find qualified candidates that match the needs of their employer’s open positions. They need to find candidates who meet their requirements in terms of skills, experience, education level, and sometimes even character. Once they have found suitable candidates they need to go through an interview process with them (either in-person or remotely) to determine whether or not they would be the right fit for that specific position.
Recruiting Strategies To Attract the Top Talent From Your Industry
Recruiting strategies are an important part of the hiring process. They are designed to attract top talent from your industry.
1. Referrals:
One of the best ways to recruit top talent is by using a referral program. This strategy is effective because it's free and it can generate more qualified candidates than recruiters could find on their own.
2. Job boards:
Looking at several career boards can be extremely beneficial for finding candidates. Many companies find success in searching for resumes that had already been submitted by applicants by keywords and other criteria.
Using job boards as a candidate
As a candidate, it can be a great idea to post your resume to a few (well-known) job boards, so recruiters in your desired niche can contact you when they have a suitable position. Bring the recruiters to you. Just ensure you include the right keywords in your resume for the jobs you want.
3. Company website:
It may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how many companies fail to put a recruitment link on their own websites.
Curious job seekers may desperately want to work with a company and will go directly to the company website to look for any job vacancies
Ensure you put your recruitment link in a place easily found by your website visitors. Either on your homepage on within a ‘careers’ tab..
4. Networking events:
Organise recruitment networking events, including training courses and meetings/conferences via Zoom and Microsoft Teams. This will allow you to establish connections with potential candidates and give them an overview of the skills and knowledge required for the positions they are interested in.
5. Social Media:
Another great way to attract top talent is through social media. It's important for companies to have a strong social media presence in order to attract new employees and build relationships with current ones.
How Recruiters Find Candidates On Social Media and How to Optimise Social Profiles for Them
Social media has become an important tool for recruiters, especially when they are looking for new talent. It's a place where they can find potential candidates with the skillsets and experience that their clients need.
For candidates, social media is a great way to get your name out there and find potential opportunities. But how do recruiters find candidates on social media?
Since social media like LinkedIn has so many users, recruiters can use filters to find potential candidates that match their specific criteria. For example, recruiters can search by location, current and past company, years of experience, and other factors.
Optimizing your social media page for candidates
An optimized social media profile will help you stand out from the crowd of other candidates and will help you land more interviews. Here are a few tips if you’re a candidate looking to have a positive social media profile for recruiters:
- Get on LinkedIn
- Use a professional profile picture
- Use hashtags for the niche you want to be seen in
- Show off your skills. Demonstrate your abilities on Linked in, use the posts section, write your thoughts and get endorsements
- Engage with others in your network
- Talk well about past employers
Optimizing your social media page for recruiters
- Use a range of social media including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and even TikTok (depending on your target candidates).
- For a better idea of social media, demographics see this, Types of social media recruitment.
- Use hashtags to search for potential candidates
- Search your competitor's current/ past employee lists.
- Update your page often with original content, engage with your audience
- Send potential candidates personalized messages (make them feel valued)
- Use easy-to-spot links to your recruitment page on your social media
- Place tracking parameters on your recruitment link to see where your applications are coming from
Le’s look at this in more detail:
How do recruiters find candidates on LinkedIn?
Recruiters use LinkedIn to identify and contact potential candidates by looking for current or past employees of their company, people who have been employed at the same company as someone already on the team, people with similar skills or academic backgrounds to other teams
The recruiter's top place to find candidates is LinkedIn and they can use keywords like location, job title, or other filters to search through millions of professionals.
This lets them find both active job seekers as well as passive candidates who may not be looking for a job change but could be convinced to make a move for the right offer.
They won't look very far into a candidate. They'll just look at the job title, recent work description, and sometimes the list of skills they offer and then turn away quickly.
6. Career Fairs
Some companies and employers do their recruiting and hiring in person, not just online.
If you're looking for a career fair or other recruiting activities, it's worth checking the web to see if they're participating in any career fairs or other recruiting activities.
Career fairs are a great place for candidates to hand in their resumes and ask valuable questions to employers.
It's a great idea to meet employers from your niche, even if you don’t want to work with them. You may get valuable insights into the industry that you didn’t know.
Some valuable questions to ask are:
- What roles are you hiring for?
- What qualities do you look for in candidates for those roles?
Attend career fairs at high schools, colleges, and universities
Don't get complacent as a recruiter – keep trying new things. If you only attend the same career fairs each year, you're missing out on potential candidates from other places. Hold career fairs at churches and other non-traditional locations to reach a more diverse pool of applicants. You may want to recruit people from different nationalities, gender, and socioeconomic backgrounds to help create a more diverse workforce.
7. Examine your existing pool of candidates
You can search through your existing database of candidates for a specific role (e.g. by using an Excel spreadsheet or recruiting software), and recruiting software helps you find the right candidates by allowing you to search using keywords while recruiting resumes and extracts information so you have uniform records for each candidate.
Conclusion: How do recruiters find candidates?
Most recruiters use a combination of different techniques to find successful candidates. Recruiting is like sales, in that recruiters are selling the position to candidates and selling candidates to hiring managers. Most recruiters will use multiple sourcing techniques so they can find the best possible candidates.
If you’re a candidate reading this, understanding how recruiters find candidates can help you as a job seeker speed up the process and increase your chances of finding a good opportunity.