How do I find new candidates for my job opening?

Growth image by Michael GiuffridaThere are many sites on which you can post your job opening and each has its unique features.  Some specialize in a particular industry like Monster and others have wide sources of candidates such as CareerBuilder.  The challenge I have found with these massive sites is that I actually receive TOO MANY resumes!  It makes it incredibly difficult to sift through the candidates to find the ones you actually want to talk to.  I have found great success using LinkedIn job postings to get enough candidates to choose from, but not so many that I am overwhelmed. Additionally, it is extremely cost effective to post a job on LinkedIn starting at only a few hundred dollars.

Another tactic I use is to pay to promote the job.  You can pay a certain about per click and set a maximum budget so you don’t break the bank.  I have found that $1.50 per click and a $200 budget has been plenty to get what I need.  If you compare the total cost of under $500 doing it this way to some of the other alternatives, it is a bargain and a fairly painless process.


Michael Giuffrida from Southington CT has been operating businesses since 1997.  He is an experienced entrepreneur in business management, profitable growth, business valuation, mergers and acquisitions, and information technology managed services.

10 thoughts on “How do I find new candidates for my job opening?

  • I agree with Michael on the burden of numerous resumes from job boards and prefer the targeted approach such as Linked In. I was not aware of the pay to promote via a click and found that interesting. I would add that networking is great tool for the employer as well as the candidate.

  • I’m currently looking to fill a specialized job opening and totally forgot about LinkedIn. Gonna give it a shot. Thanks

  • Thanks Michael. I’ve read about pay per click auction models like the one offered on LinkedIn (i.e., Sponsored Jobs) – one of the advantages of being a small business is the flexibility to choose creative recruiting tactics like this one! Unfortunately, many of us are at the mercy of our corporate HR departments and their policies, which may not fund these types of tools. More often than not, if I know that a position will be difficult to fill, I find myself bargaining with management to weigh the fee we would pay a headhunter against what can often be months of staff time and money saved by not having to sift through resumes and fruitless interviews … not to mention the costs to the business (which are many!) of leaving a position vacant for longer than it should be.

  • All excellent points. One of the latest things we are using as you mentioned is LInkedIn but reaching out to candidates that are currently in similar roles. Instead of using job postings we conduct searches on skill sets that we want in the role we are looking for and then send the person that we think would be a fit a message.

  • I have seen fairly recently an example of bigger sites yielding too many applicants. Unfortunately it’s easy for individual positions to get lost in the crowd on major sites, resulting in candidates dropping rather generic resumes on any job opening in their field. Luckily I was not the one who had to do the sifting at my company, but I saw the sheer number of resumes that were went through. More targeted searching through LinkedIn seems like a much better bet to me.

  • I have found the best results I have recently had are using indeed, also keep in mind how your company looks on glassdoor, as your reputation may keep good candidates away.

  • I’m not directly involved with hiring, but it’s interesting to read about this from the job poster’s perspective. I’ve only really used Indeed and Monster and it can be overwhelming for the candidates as well -especially when postings are vague.

  • A good reminder to make Linked In a regular go to site. I often search applicants that I am scheduled to interview on LI to guage their level of professionalism.

  • When I was a hiring manager, we would receive hundreds of resumes for a single opening. It was very overwhelming and time consuming to sift through them to find the ones that were actually potential matches to the experience and skill sets we were looking for. Perhaps in a future post, you could provide some tips on the best way to triage a giant pile of resumes? (My first pass was always to eliminate any with typos, formatting errors, etc. under the premise that if they couldn’t take the time to make sure their first impression was perfect, they’re not going to take the time to make sure their everyday performance is high quality either.)

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