Struggling To Find Job Candidates?

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I know firsthand how annoying hiring job candidates can be for your company. This is a problem that most small business owners face throughout the world, because when it comes to hiring, we have a very specific person in mind. We need something very specific for our company–a certain set of skills, a certain income that we want to pay them, a certain atmosphere that we have in our company that they have to be able to adapt to, and so on.

So, when it comes to finding that perfect candidate, we have to sort through a million different resumes, have a million different interviews, and have to train a bunch of people. Then, at the end of the day, those people may even leave after you’ve trained them because they’re not the right fit. Or, you have to let them go if they’re not learning fast enough. Whatever it is, it can be frustrating. So let’s talk about how we can make it a little bit easier.

How I Used To Hire People

First, let me tell you how I used to hire people. So, when I first started my company, I was looking for a bunch of different employees- writers, assistants, project managers, & a several other positions.

When I was hiring, it used to look something like this: I would go online and I would publish a job posting. Hundreds of applications would come back. Then, I would sit down and I would go through every single application. Every time I found a good application, I would call that person. A lot of the time, they wouldn’t answer the phone. So I would leave them a voicemail. They would have to call me back. I would have to manage the scheduling of all interviews manually. People were coming in at different times, and it got super confusing! Not to mention, it was overwhelming because the reason I was hiring in the first place as to make things easier for me.

So when just hiring people turns into its own full-time job, it’s so frustrating. So let me tell you what hiring looks like for me now.

How I Hire People Today

Today, if I have to hire someone, I literally get three to five job candidates that set their own phone interview with me. I look at my calendar, and all I have to do is attend those three to five phone interviews and pick the best one. Sounds like a dream, right? So let me tell you about how I do this and how you can implement something like this in your own business.

How to Hire People For Your Company

Now, first off, the way you hire someone depends on the type of employee that you’re looking for. So, are you looking for an employee like a full-time employee that’s going to have a salary and take on a major position? Or are you looking for more of a freelancer that’s going to maybe do a project by project work or work on a very small part-time basis? The answers to these questions will change which platform I would recommend you use.

Finding Full-Time Job Candidates

So if you do want to hire an employee, what I would recommend that you use is Indeed. There are several similar platforms out there as well, and some of them might be useful to you. But, I’ve found a lot of good results with the Indeed platform. So, in order to get these amazing job candidates without spending a ton of time, I normally follow some basic steps.

Create an Indeed Ad

The first thing that I would recommend is that you make a great ad on Indeed. What a lot of people do is they just throw up a simple ad on Indeed. This is what gets a flood of applicants. Whereas what I’m recommending that you do, first off, is create a good ad.

You want to create an ad that’s going to actually represent your company. Talk about the great things about being a part of your company, and why they might want to work with your company. You have to remember that you’re selling yourself to them too. The perfect candidate is somebody who wants to work with you, but also has their own things going on in their life and their own ambitions. So, make sure that you have a good ad, and then we’ll talk about how to make use of Indeed’s built-in screening questions.

Use Specific Questions on Indeed

Indeed lets you have it so anyone who fills out an application has to answer a series of questions that you come up with. So, what I recommend that you do is include specific questions that are important to you. For example, if you already have a salary range in mind, you can put a question like, “What type of income are you expecting from this position?” and have them choose. I also recommend that you make it a multiple-choice question with ranges rather than just letting them free type something. We will explain this later on in this blog post.

Now, other than income, maybe you want to do something like experience level. Again, I would recommend that you do a multiple-choice question. You can say, “Less than a year,” “One to three years,” “Three to five years,” or whatever you want. Or, maybe you want to do something like, “What do you have experience with?” Then, they can check off what they do or do not have experience with. These are just a few examples of what you can do. You can change it to fit your needs, including as many questions as you can to help you narrow down to the perfect candidate

Now, here comes the brilliant part about it.

What About Sorting Through Responses?

Once you set up your questions and launch the ad with the questions in it, you’re going to get responses back. So, if it’s a good ad, you’re probably going to get a lot of responses back. Let’s say you get three hundred responses back. What you can do now is export that list of people into an Excel spreadsheet, view the different questions you asked, then filter that  spreadsheet by candidates’ answers.

So, let’s say I asked them, “How many years of experience do you have?” Say I gave them multiple choice answers: “Less than a year,” “One to three years,” and “Three to five years.” Now, say I preferred someone who had one to three years of experience. I can sort my Excel spreadsheet to exclude people who answered anything less than 1-3 years. This cuts down so much time because you’re pre-qualifying people. If you have things that really matter to you, this is the best way to do it, because now you’re eliminating anyone who doesn’t meet the criteria that you’re looking for. So I would highly recommend that you utilize screening questions when posting a job.

Time To Schedule Interviews!

Now, after you have filtered the people on your list, if you’re left with only a couple of people, great! You can just reach out to those people and they should be the best job candidates. If, however, you’re still left with, say, a list of 50 people and you don’t want to have 50 different interviews, the next thing I would recommend is to make an automated email sequence. This is something that we utilize within my company often, and it’s really, really effective.

So, what we would do is we would take that list of 50 people. Then, in the application process, we ask for their email address. We would just take that list of people and we would import it into our e-mail marketing platform. Then, we would send them all an email automatically. This takes just 10 minutes to set up and it’s incredibly easy to do.

So, now, this is kind of the magic part. They click to schedule an interview with you, which brings them to a page with an automated calendar scheduler. This is hooked up to your calendar so that any appointments that you have are fed into it. The applicant can go in, see the available time slots, and pick the time that works best for them. This also enables you to only be in contact with people who are actively looking for a job and are willing to take a moment to book their own interview.

Hiring Freelancers

Now, I do want to talk to you about if you are hiring a freelancer versus an employee. So, if you are hiring a freelancer, I would not recommend that you use Indeed. The reason being is a lot of people on Indeed are looking for full-time positions. It’s not necessarily a freelancer platform. Whereas if you go on to Upwork, it is a freelancer website.

How To Find Job Candidates On Upwork

There’s a lot of different freelancer websites out there. In my personal opinion, I prefer Upwork. On Upwork, we’re going to do a similar situation as what we describe with Indeed. But it’s a little bit different because they don’t offer the same question ability that Indeed does. So on Upwork, you need to create a job posting. Now, again, in this job posting, we’re going to make this super detailed. We want this to be detailed, clearly explain what we need, our company, what we’re looking for. Also, we’re going to make use of the extra sections that Upwork provides us.

So, Upwork is going to ask us about how much we want to pay the person in this role. You can select from a fixed price if it’s a singular project, or an hourly rate if it’s more of an ongoing project. You can also make use of the skills section. So, you can say “I want someone with this skill, this skill, and this skill.” Additionally, you can make use of the experience section to decide if you’re looking for more of an entry-level employee, or an expert.  Make sure if you’re looking for somebody who’s an expert, you’re utilizing that section so that you get more of those types of job candidates.

What’s Left?

Now, within the job post itself, I also do something that helps me to really cut down my time on this platform. I’ll say “in your proposal, include how much you expect to make on this project.” Or, “What type of experience do you have with X, Y and Z.” Or. “Please include links to your previous work that you’ve done,” or other things like that. That’ll help you cut it down and get straight to the point.

Now, something else that I’ve found effective is saying, “In your proposal, please include… [some unique quote].” If they don’t include what I ask, there is a good chance they didn’t read my description. They just see, “Website developer needed,” and will send in a basic cover letter. Making specific requests makes it easy for me to cut down on the people who actually read it and are seriously interested, versus the people who were just rushing to apply to as many random jobs as they could find. After all this, I’m normally left with a pretty well-suited handful of people. If you want to narrow it down more, they also let you shortlist people so you can build a list of your favorite candidates.

At this point, no matter which one of these platforms you’re using, you should be able to create an automated way to go and narrow down from a large list of applicants.

As mentioned above, if you are interested in our automation software, we have it available in the Finally Visible Academy and we also sell it separately. You can find those links below. Or, you can go to finallyvisible.com.