The current labour market is forcing many companies (if not everyone) to use new ways to find people to hire. In my last two articles and videos I covered how to appeal to potential candidates who are looking for a change and how to market what you have to offer people to build their interest in your company.

Even with that people may not be finding your job postings so you need to connect with people that might be shopping around for a new job. Face it, if someone wants a job there are plenty to be had. But people are pickier now because there are more opportunities to change jobs and do something that suits them better or work for a company that has a more appealing culture and management style.

In this article I will focus on finding candidates using Indeed and LinkedIn. Where I live these are the two platforms that seem to work best to search for candidates. The databases on these sites have grown immensely and have elaborate search capability as well as tools to contact candidates and track your conversations. This makes the work easier and more productive.

Indeed, has a subscription service called Find Resumes. It is a paid monthly subscription that you can cancel at any time. They do offer a free trial for new subscribers. It is reasonably priced and is quite effective if used well. You basically enter your search criteria such as job title and geographical location and hit enter. It brings up a list of people and what is great it shows you the last date they updated their resume. This could be a good indicator that they would be interested to explore your job offer.

You can further expand your search by adding more job titles from the recommended list that appears next to your search results. You can even filter by company where they have worked, years of experience and show results by when they last updated their resume. So, if you want to see only resumes that were updated in the last week you can choose that.

LinkedIn offers a similar tool called Recruiter and Recruiter Lite. Recruiter can search all of LinkedIn while the Lite version gives you access to three degrees of connection to you. However, Recruiter is quite expensive and probably affordable to larger companies or those with many jobs to fill.

The search function on LinkedIn is even more comprehensive than on Indeed, but you cannot tell if someone has updated their profile recently. For higher skilled professional jobs, I prefer LinkedIn, but I find Indeed better for mid range jobs. Both systems allow you to create projects and save your candidates to that project.

Once you’ve done a search and found some interesting candidates to contact, both platforms provide a way to send in-mails through their system. Here I suggest personalizing the message to include something about the past work experience or a particular skill and why that makes them a good fit. This will show them you are taking an interest in them and not just using the same template that you send to everyone.

I know some recruiters use social media sites like Facebook to recruit people, but I have not used this method so far. To post a job on Facebook, you need a company page, and you can post the job for free. I recommend this if you have an active Facebook page with people who follow and engage with your posts. I have used groups on Facebook to post freelance jobs for special projects and that has worked very well.

Recruiting has changed because of technology, the pandemic, and the fact that people have had the time to experience working remotely, which has provided needed flexibility. It has also given people the time to reflect on what they really want in a job and explore new options.