How To Find The Best Employees For Your Business

help wanted sign

Learning how to find employees for your business is as much an art as it is a science. At first, you may rely on familiar methods like advertising in local media. Eventually, you’ll discover more efficient ways to find the high-potential employees you’re looking for.

We’re here to help you skip right to the good stuff and learn how to find employees for your business without spending a fortune.

Table Of Contents

How To Find Employees: Use What You’ve Got

Women trying to learn how to find employees

1) Define Your Company Culture

Contrary to conventional wisdom, learning how to find employees for your business doesn’t start with posting job openings in help-wanted ads. No, the first step in the process is defining your company culture.

Your company culture is your identity, your brand, and your message to potential new hires that answers the question, “Why would I want to be a part of that team?”

Maybe you see your company culture as classy and upscale. Or, maybe you see it as elegant with a soupçon of irreverence. Defining it — perhaps, even writing it down — will help others see it as well.

So, before you start thinking about filling open positions, take a few minutes to define your company culture. That way, prospective team members will know right away if your business is the right one for them.

2) Ask Your Employees For Leads

Asking your current employees for leads on potential new hires is a great way to supplement the more active methods of finding employees.

Word of mouth is often more powerful than some of the methods we’ll discuss later on in this article and is an excellent resource that all business owners and managers should tap.

You might even consider incentivizing the process by offering a reward to the employee who brings in a new hire who lasts a certain amount of time. Or, for even more goodwill, offer a reward to the whole team if someone recommends a new hire who stays on.

3) Write A Great Job Description

Person writing a job description for job hiring

Another powerful tool in the process of finding employees by using what you’ve got is writing a great job description. Doing so serves two important purposes, one external and one internal.

First and foremost, writing a good job description can give prospective team members a more accurate picture of what the job involves.

At the same time, it can help you identify your ideal employee for the position. Armed with that information, you can focus your job search in a way that reaches the target audience the best.

Take the time to review, revise, and perfect the job descriptions for all your positions before you start searching for new employees.

4) Always Be On The Lookout

Many managers only work on finding new employees while they’re at their desk. Don’t restrict yourself like this. Instead, always be on the lookout for good talent.

Wherever you go, keep your eyes open for people with specific skills, traits, or attitudes that would work well in your business.

You can always teach someone to perform hard skills, like filing and scheduling. But it’s much more difficult to teach someone soft skills, like how to interact well with others.

For example, if you have an opening for an executive assistant with good people skills, be on the lookout for someone who exhibits those traits. Consider offering them an opportunity to interview — even if they’re working in an entirely different industry.

5) Ask Your Customers To Spread The Word

Your customers are a potential wealth of referrals just waiting to happen. Take advantage of this untapped resource by asking them to spread the word about your search for a new employee.

You could:

  • Post signs near the register
  • Train your servers to mention the opening when they bring the check
  • Print a message on the customer’s receipt
  • Send out an email blast
  • Text or tweet your hiring needs

As you did when asking your employees for leads, you might consider offering a small prize — a cup of coffee, an appetizer, or a T-shirt — to anyone who responds with the name of someone who comes in for an interview.

How To Find Employees: Reach Out

Business newspaper

6) Advertise Job Openings On Facebook

It’s lost some of its cache in the past few years, but Facebook is still one of the best ways to find employees for your business.

Millions use it every day, and the platform comes with powerful targeting features that let you broadcast job openings to those online based on a wide range of variables, including:

  • Location
  • Age
  • Job
  • Skills
  • Experience
  • Keywords

So, if you’re looking for a coffee shop worker in Albuquerque, you can specify that area and that profession. When your ad goes live, the system will send it to everyone in the Albuquerque area who has “barista” in their job title (and that’s just a very basic example).

7) Partner With Local Schools

Another great way to find employees for your business is to partner with local schools. Most colleges, universities, and even high schools have services to help their students find jobs before, during, and after graduation.

Take advantage of the reach these services offer by advertising your job opening through their email distribution list, on their job board, or at an upcoming career fair.

Even talking to schools an hour away from your business can reach more potential new hires and help you find the right fit for the job.

8) Use Other Social Media

Social media for how to find employees

Social media platforms are everywhere these days, and it’s hard to keep track of them all. But when it comes to learning how to find employees for your business, you really don’t have to dig that deep.

The big ones that have been around for a while — LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram, and Pinterest — are still excellent resources for posting job openings.

You can, of course, plan an elaborate campaign on all of these platforms, but even a simple post advertising what you’re looking for and your contact information can be extremely effective.

Like Facebook, some social media platforms even let you target your posts to reach as wide or as narrow an audience as possible.

9) Build A “Now Hiring” Page On Your Website

Your business website is the perfect place to advertise any job openings you may have. For one thing, it’s probably free to add another page to your domain, so it won’t cost you an arm and a leg to get the word out.

For another thing, when you do put a “Now Hiring” or “Careers” page on your website, your business will likely turn up somewhere in the search results if someone is actively looking for a job in your area.

10) Post Signs And Flyers

It may seem old-school, but posting signs and flyers can get you even more views than other options on this list.

You can never be sure if potential employees will find your job opening online, but if you post signs and flyers in the right places, you can be sure that they’ll catch the eye of potential new hires.

A sign in a window or a flyer on a bulletin board stands out as unique among the ads people receive on their phones and tablets every day.

Build Your Team With Inch

Inch app

Learning how to find employees for your business — and not just any employees, the best employees — takes time and effort to get right.

It can’t just be a hit-or-miss activity that you do when you’ve got some free time. Because, let’s face it, as a business owner or manager, when do you ever have free time?

No, the new-employee search — and building a strong team — is all about carving out time in your busy schedule to focus on the task at hand.

For that, you need the right tool. You need Inch.

Inch is a suite of tools built on the foundation of helping you simplify and streamline scheduling, time tracking, and task management — for you and your employees.

With Inch as your workforce management partner, you’ll be able to optimize every aspect of your business — including setting aside time to learn how to find employees to build your team.

Try Inch for free today and find out what your business has been missing and what it won’t be able to do without.

For more free resources to help you manage your business better, organize and schedule your team, and track and calculate labor costs, visit TryInch.com today.

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