Through my years of working in the Talent Acquisition industry, I’ve come across many professionals who have varying views on how to attract and find the right talent. Most professionals take a pray and post approach to finding talent. Instead of thinking outside the box to find talent, they rely on the traditional job boards, applicant tracking system, career page, and brand recognition. While having everything that I just mentioned is key to your employment branding and recruitment marketing strategy, you need more than that to attract passive job seekers. Passive job seekers aren’t always on the hunt for their next role and typically don’t frequent the same spots that an active job seeker would.
In order to stand out from the crowd, I recommend adding another dynamic to your current strategy. Outside of the typical approach that most employers have, I encourage you to think like a job seeker. To find the best talent, you need to reach out to them in a way that truly connects with them. To do this, I recommend doing the following things:
Facebook Groups
Facebook may seem like a network that you frequent to chat with family and friends, but there’s so much untapped potential within the network. Outside of the standard news feed, Facebook has many great professional job and industry-specific groups. The groups can range from tech jobs, industry professional networking, remote workers, and many more! On top of offering a wide variety of groups, the groups that you can discover are global, and not limited to your geographic location.
While many professionals may write off this network, it’s definitely one that you should put on your list in 2019. Outside of stories and filters, you can source and find some amazing talent. The search capabilities on Instagram are very robust and user-friendly when it comes to finding talent based on location and skill set.
Meetup.com
The name may be deceiving, as it might come across as a dating site. Don’t be fooled, as there’s loads of potential with Meetup.com. If you’re looking for talent in your neck of the woods, you’ll want to add it to your strategy. Meetup.com is global and offers thousands of professional and social groups. Whether you’re looking to find a Full Stack Engineer or interact with Java users, this site offers it all. You can engage with users via the message board, email, and attend meetups. It’s a great way to source new talent, talk shop, or sponsor a group to increase your brand awareness.
Industry Specific Sites
To truly find the best passive talent out there, you need to play on the same playground that they’re playing on. In the tech field, a lot of the talent that you’re looking for doesn’t just spend their days on LinkedIn or Indeed. Consider adding the following sites to your strategy:
- Stack Overflow – The world’s most trusted developer resource. If the world’s top developers are on here and you’re in need of a developer, you have no reason not to invest in it. Stack Overflow offers great talent attraction, the ability to post jobs, company pages, and great sourcing capabilities. Unlike other job boards, you can’t Boolean Search from a search engine to find the great talent on Stack Overflow.
- GitHub – Another great option to add to your strategy. While not as robust as Stack Overflow, GitHub still offers you the ability to post jobs. One plus side to GitHub is that you can source talent for free. It allows you to be very granular in your search, narrowing it down to tech stack and location.
- Dribbble – Unlike Stack Overflow and GitHub, Dribbble is king when it comes to finding the top UX/UI talent. Dribbble allows you to source talent, post meetups/hiring events, post open jobs, and create a company page.
In conclusion, if you want to find the top talent, you need to be where the top talent is at. The only way to do that is to think like a job seeker.
About the author: Alex Her is an Employment Experience and Recruitment Specialist, who has a strong passion for employment branding and recruitment marketing. If you would like to get in touch with Alex, feel free to leave a comment below.
