How to Find Your Dream Candidates — on the Cheap

Building a recruitment advertising strategy that brings your dream candidates to your company’s door doesn’t have to be expensive, nor does it have to be handled by a full-service recruiting team. It can be planned and executed in house with a very small budget — or even no extra budget at all.

Where Should You Look for Your Dream Candidates?

You won’t need a ton of media exposure to find the ideal candidates for your vacant positions. You should focus on quality, not quantity, and big media exposure will bring you nothing more than lots of mediocre candidates, flooding your email with resumes and wasting your days with needless interviews.

The perfect places to find your ideal candidates are online communities related to your industry, such as Reddit, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, and various forums.

What makes these communities so valuable is that they are places where people are exchanging opinions and talking about their careers sincerely — without the pressure of being interviewed. The people who participate in these communities also tend to be very passionate about and engaged in their professions — they are, after all, taking time outside of work to talk about their fields, exchange opinions, and stay updated on the latest news and trends.

There are online communities for almost all professions, and your job is to find the communities where your kind of candidate hangs out. Once you find these communities, take your time and read all the recent discussions. Go back at least a few months. At this point, you will have a clear image of who the most active members are. Make a list of their names or online nicknames. You should have a list of at least 10-50 possible candidates, depending on the size of the community.

You want to look at the most active members of the community because their high levels of activity prove their passion. What their activity doesn’t prove, however, is whether or not their work ethics or values are in line with your company’s expectations and culture.

What you need to do now, then, is to read through your potential candidates’ posts. Read as many posts as you can. Doing this will give you a clear image of each candidate’s personality, career goals, values, and work ethic. Delete from your list the people who don’t share your company’s values or who have career goals that don’t fit with your company’s vision.

After all of this research, the people left on your list will be your dream candidates.

How Do You Convince Them to Take the Job?

Now that you have a list of candidates, you should find out as much information as you can about each one of them. Search their social media profiles and blogs, read up, and learn everything about them. I suggest you try to build a buyer persona for each candidate, based on the research you’ve carried out. These personas can help you craft employee value propositions that are specific to each candidate.

You can also begin to gain your dream candidates’ attention by posting in their community. Create a new post or discussion topic with a title along the lines of, “What is your dream job?” or “What do you hate about your current job?” Being the most active members of their community, your dream candidates will probably read your post and join the discussion. This helps you put yourself on their radars — and it uncovers more useful information about the candidates.

The vast majority of the candidates on your list will already have jobs. If you expect to woo them over to your company, you’ll have to come armed with an offer they won’t be able to turn down. I cannot give specific advice about the kinds of offers you should make, as this depends entirely on your company, the position you are filling, and the candidate’s profile.

What I can say, however, is that it is a good idea to be creative with your approach. For example, you can emphasize the characteristics of your company that are in line with your candidates’ answers to your “dream job” post.

Even if you are not looking to recruit someone right now, you should regularly participate in these communities via a company account. This will put you in touch with the most passionate professionals in your industry and make it easier to recruit them when the need arises.