Searching for candidates – what’s your plan?

An opening comes up within your company and you need to fill it urgently, but where do you start? The recruitment process has changed drastically over the past few years; no longer do you place a welcoming advert in the local newspaper and wait for the CV’s to pile up. You need an action plan in place to ensure you recruit the best of the best!

To enable you to find the perfect candidate Vivid Resourcing talk you through the options available in the candidate search.

There are now hundreds of methods to advertise your job vacancies via, to make sure you attract the right candidate you need to choose the most appropriate medium.

Job Boards

Job boards may seem old school but they’re there because they work. The majority of them are niche and therefore attract the individuals with the right skills for the job. Job boards have taken on a mind of their own since they have been enthused with a digital twist – in the past you advertised your position, in a university or the appropriate department of a company, and waited for the CV’s to arrive. Now job boards are fast and furious, there’s thousands of them online to choose from and thousands of applicants who view them.

The best approach is to do your research, how many job boards are relevant to your required area? What statistics can they provide you with; their target market, general respondents, placement success rate?

Media

Many companies dismiss the media to advertise a job role as they believe this approach to be too general. However, there are various routes you can take – if you have the budget you can choose to advertise in a local or national newspaper, this attracts large audiences and requires the resources to deal with the responses.

Alternatively, a method much preferred by most businesses, advertise in trade press. This doesn’t reach an audience as farfetched as national media but it does attract a specific type of candidate, one that is more likely to be suitable to the role you are trying to fill. This is better targeted advertisement.

Social Media

Feared by some as being too personal for advertising a job, social media is a cautious new comer to recruitment. Some platforms are more appropriate than others for job advertisements and it’s up to you to decide which is most suitable for your target audience. Facebook can be useful for raising awareness to a younger audience, whereas LinkedIn is ideal for mid to high-level professionals. For those unfamiliar with using social media for sourcing a candidate LinkedIn is probably your best option; it’s designed to make it easy for employers by providing access to thousands of possible candidates, found by key word search and instant access to thousands of CV’s (displayed on profile pages) – every small businesses dream.

Those working in creative industries have even been known to advertise job vacancies via YouTube or Vine. Just remember, you need to choose the channel most appropriate to your company and your target audience.

Agencies

The moment an employee hands in a letter of resignation will often send chills down your spine – the thought of the long arduous process of having to find an individual that is capable of filling that role. This is where agencies come in to play; they do all the hard work so you don’t have to. Agencies have progressed over the last few years in line with the job market – many of them specialising in a few choice areas of recruitment, rather than being a jack of all trades.

Small companies often don’t have access to the resources to run a recruitment campaign and agencies often provide the best solution, saving time and money. Agencies are provided with a brief and it is left up to them to source the candidates and deliver them to the company for the interview.

Many companies are choosing various mediums to advertise job roles via to create the best reach and attract the most talent.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Leah .