How to Find Employees: 3 Tips for Hiring More Efficiently

Employees are the lifeblood of any business, and small and mid-sized companies in particular rely on a relatively modest group of employees to ensure smooth operations and the best chances for success. Unfortunately, hiring efficiently can be one of the biggest pain points for businesses as they look to scale their model and grow. Not only is hiring a long, multi-step process, but it can be difficult for smaller firms to even know where to start when it comes to creating a job description, attracting quality candidates, vetting potential hires, and making a competitive offer.

Below, we take a closer look at some expert hiring tips businesses across industries can adopt to find, attract, and hire the right employees for their needs.

Choose the Right Hiring Platform

These days, most hiring is done through a dedicated hiring platform—a website or similar service that facilitates connections between businesses and potential employees. There are a huge number of hiring platforms available, and they are far from equal. Some will have a general focus and others a more specific aim. At the same time, some platforms provide a full-service experience for businesses, including everything from automated job description creation and posting to candidate vetting tools, interview platforms, and more; others are more bare-bones and leave some of these details to the business itself.

Selecting the right platform for your business and needs can dramatically improve candidate quality while also reducing time-to-hire. A hiring platform that lacks sufficient reach, for instance, will not get your job posting in front of a large and high-quality pool of potential applicants—and you’ll need to wait longer to build up a candidate pool or, worse yet, spend additional time posting the job elsewhere.

AI-powered platforms like ZipRecruiter can offer enhanced benefits compared to a traditional job board. ZipRecruiter, for example, not only helps to automate the process of writing and posting a job description, but also uses AI to match the description to qualified candidates. This targeted approach helps to narrow a pool of more than 21 million potential job-seekers using the platform to help your business find the best candidates for your specific job.

When considering whether to use a hiring platform, it’s a good idea to ask the following questions:

1. What is its reach? Does the platform ensure that your job will be posted widely, or is the reach too narrow for your search? In the example above, ZipRecruiter can automatically send a posting to more than 100 other job boards, instantly boosting visibility.
2. What data can the platform provide you as a hirer? Many of the most popular hiring platforms offer comprehensive data on potential applicants, as well as analytics that help you to identify potential weak spots in your hiring process.
3. Is there a balance of automation and a user-directed approach? Automating aspects of the hiring process can be a crucial time-saving technique, but some businesses want to be able to maintain a more hands-on approach. Be sure to see what a potential hiring platform offers and how flexible its services are.
4. How is the platform making use of AI? AI can be a powerful tool in the hiring world, but hiring platforms are making use of it in different ways and adopting it at different rates. Decide what may be best for your business first, then seek out a platform with services that match those needs.

Create a Winning Job Description

When you’ve selected a hiring platform, the next step is often to create a job description that will both accurately and efficiently present the details of the position as well as entice the most qualified applicants. Clarity and specificity in a job posting tend to attract better candidates, regardless of the industry. Your description should include as many of the details of the position as possible without superfluous language.

Consider creating a job description based on the following short template:

• Clear job title
• Key responsibilities of the position and desired outcomes
• Required vs. preferred qualifications
• Compensation transparency (if applicable)
• Company culture or value alignment notes

For more specialized roles, job-specific templates can also be a good option.

AI tools can be valuable in crafting, editing, and improving job descriptions in various ways. These tools can help to enhance language in the description for clarity and search engine optimization, for example, or to quickly compare a job description against others for similar positions offered by other companies.

There are other important ways that AI can be useful in this part of the process as well. Job descriptions can inadvertently contain inherent bias that may deter some candidates, for instance, or that may even put the hiring company at risk of legal action in extreme cases.

Vet Candidates Quickly and Effectively

A final tip for employers looking to secure the best candidate for a position is to complete the vetting and hiring process as quickly and efficiently as possible while still remaining thorough. A qualified candidate may be considering multiple job offers simultaneously, and hesitation or delay on the part of a prospective employer can be the difference between hiring that person and them accepting another position elsewhere.

A hiring platform like ZipRecruiter can speed up this process as well without sacrificing comprehensiveness in the search process. Here are some time-saving vetting tactics that you might consider assigning to a hiring platform:

1. Offering pre-screening questionnaires
2. Automating resume filtering with AI
3. Conducting short video screens before interviews

In each of these cases, the goal is to help companies to filter out candidates that are more obviously not a good match for a given role early in the process so as to save time later on. The use of AI in these types of processes is evolving at a rapid pace; indeed, some candidates may employ methods in an attempt to trick AI screeners to give them an advantage over other applicants.

This is just one reason why it’s important for companies to maintain a human connection with applicants at this stage of the hiring process, besides the obvious benefit of helping to put forward the clearest and most comprehensive view of what the company’s day-to-day culture is. It is increasingly possible to automate just about every part of the job hiring process, but there may be reasons for different companies to keep some things human-focused instead. Ideally, you’ll be able to strike a balance between human connection and automated efficiency and clarity.

The Bottom Line

Hire more effectively with expert tips including the use of the proper hiring platform, a carefully constructed job description, and tools to vet candidates as quickly and effectively as possible. There is no one way to go through this process, and each company’s approach will be different. Finding the best method for your company can help you to find, attract, and hire the top candidate for your position.