If you have ever tried hiring a top-performing team member, you know it’s not that easy. 😖
You can publish a job offer and post it on a job board, and you may get around 5-10 applicants. But if you want to find the perfect hire, you will need 30+ candidates to choose from.
So what can you do to get more top job applicants?
No matter whether you have a huge HR & Recruitment department backing you up or not, there’s a lot you can do as the hiring manager.
How to find all the gems in the job market? – Image source
For the past 2 years, one of my key tasks as a team-lead has been to hire top talent. And as a marketer, I know a thing or two about human psychology, good copywriting, and getting the job offers in front of thousands of people. 👀
After hiring for 20+ roles, reviewing 200+ home assignments, and conducting 50+ interviews, here are my 10 suggestions: for writing the perfect job description, getting more people excited to join your company, and nailing down the perfect candidate.
- Define who it is that you’re looking for
- Write the perfect job description
- Mention all the perks you can think of
- Publish the job offer, duh…
- Publish and share the job offer in 5+ other channels
- Use social media ads to spread the word
- Ask your community, team, and friends for referrals
- Do outreach on LinkedIn
- Test publishing multiple job offers
- Make sure to give fast feedback to all applicants
Sounds fairly logical, right? 💁
Let’s take a closer look on how to nail down each of the above points so that you can 2x or even 5x the number of applicants to the open roles in your company.
1. Define who it is that you’re looking for
As you’re reading this article, you’re probably looking to start hiring FAST.
Sorry to start with the boring part, but going through this will help you get a lot more relevant job applicants.
Before you start to hire someone, it is critical that you know exactly what that person’s tasks will be, what skills they should have, and what type of personality is suitable for that role.
Map out these 4 key areas
Once you know the answer, it will be a lot easier to write a job offer with all the relevant information. You will also be able to create a better home task and a set of interview questions to assess the experience, skillset, and personality of your applicants.
Here’s a quick example. When hiring a Full-Stack marketer in MeetFrank, I wrote down the following:
Tasks they’ll be working on: Content writing for blog & emails, blog SEO, email automation, evaluating the marketing KPIs and suggesting ideas for growing results, website landing page management
Skillset needed for the job: Excellent English copywriting, knowhow of B2B marketing tactics and email marketing, SEO and website conversion optimization
Experience & seniority: At least 2 years of experience in digital B2B marketing + experience with email automation
Personality traits: Proactive, creative, problem-solver, curious to test new things, straightforward and no-fuzz, getting-things-done attitude
2. Write the perfect job description
Let’s start with a quick hack: Many times I was going to write a job description, I browsed similar openings on global job boards. 🤭It is sometimes crazy helpful.
This is especially helpful if you’re hiring for high-level roles or are not quite sure what to write to the job opening.
Say you’re looking for a Senior Mobile Developer. You can check out Indeed.com and the job openings for that role.
Browse other companies’ job openings
You can check out around 5-10 job openings and copy-paste the most useful ideas to your job offer template.
Example of a job offer you could “steal” the ideas from
Now that you have some ideas, you’ll be confronted with one of the key questions in every hiring process:
How to write a job offer that makes people excited about the role?
How to get the applicants excited? – Image source
From a psychological standpoint, the most important thing for a person reading a job opening are these three questions:
- Is this job opening relevant for me?
- Would it be exciting to work in this role?
- Am I qualified to apply for the job?
I kind of even like the character limit in MeetFrank’s hiring product. It makes you focus on the key things (notice that the job offer also answers to the above questions):
- Who are you looking for?
- What would the person be doing?
- What skills and experience are needed?
Our job offer in MeetFrank
The good part about hiring with MeetFrank was that every time a person gets a job offer, they can also see a lot of extra information about the company, making them more excited to join.
Company profile in the MeetFrank app
If you’re publishing a job opening on your website or job board, you can add a brief company introduction to the top of the job offer. Here’s an example from the Airbnb careers page:
Don’t forget to write about your company – Image source
Based on the above best practices, you should be able to write much stronger job offers that attract top talent.
There’s one more thing you can do to get another 20%-30% of the readers interested in applying… Write about the perks of working in your company.
3. Mention all the perks you can think of
It is always a good idea to list all the employee perks in your company.
Although let’s be honest about it: the top-performers are not joining your company for nice-to-have perks. Above all, they will join because of the company’s mission, personal growth potential, and a great team.
However, adding the perks to the end of your job openings doesn’t hurt.
Here are a few ideas:
- The number of paid vacation days
- Company get-aways & summits
- Healthy food and snacks
- Great office location
- Pingpong table and other games
- Paid conferences & work travel
- Parental and family leave
- Healthcare benefits
- Paid gym membership
Perks on Airbnb’s careers site
There is one more thing that’s becoming increasingly important to top talent: the opportunity for flexible work.
According to LinkedIn’s 2019 report, there’s been a 78% increase in job offers mentioning flexible work.
31% of job offers mention flexible work options – Image source
In the roles that are harder to fill in, companies are also allowing remote work.
According to another LinkedIn report, candidates don’t apply immediately after hearing about a job. Before applying, 59% look up the company’s website, 66% percent want to know about your company’s mission and values, 54% about perks and benefits, and 50% about the mission statement. Try to mention all of the above in the job opening or on your company’s careers site if you have one.
4. Publish the job offer, duh…
I’m not going to stop a lot on this point of the article.
However, it’s the next logical step in your hiring process to publish the job offer on your website.
You can later share the link to the published job offer in other channels as well.
5. Publish and share the job offer in 5+ other channels
Most people hiring will publish a job opening on their website and maybe also on the local job board.
And that’s it.
Then they will sit back and wait for the applicants to send over their resumes… 🙄
That’s why most companies fail to attract top talent.
Waiting for those applicants to come in – Image source
If you really want to reach the top talent, you can be sure that they are not lurking around in the job market. Because they are already happily hired.
So you need to work harder to make sure the best people will see your job offer.
Here are 5 ideas for increasing the visibility of your job openings:
- Publish your job opening on LinkedIn.
- Publish your job opening on your company’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram profiles.
- Reach out to universities, so they’ll include your job offer in student newsletters.
- Publish your job openings in relevant social media groups, both on Facebook and LinkedIn
- Publish your job opening on MeetFrank to reach 200,000+ passive job-seekers across Europe. #shamelesspromo
6. Use social media ads to spread the word
The nice thing about being a marketer is that I’m able to promote all the roles I’m hiring for.
Although we haven’t gotten that many good candidates from Facebook ads (more from headhunting and networking), I would still suggest testing it out.
Here’s an example of a hiring ad we recently did with MeetFrank.
MeetFrank hiring ad on Facebook
A good Facebook hiring ad should have minimal copy, but explain what the role is about and what’s the expected skillset.
Facebook allows you to target people based on their interests, so it’s quite easy to reach the right people.
You can target people based on their interests
Not sure which budget to use? You can set your ad to run for 7 days and use a budget of €100-€500 to see how many applicants you’ll get.
7. Ask your community, team, and friends for referrals
Whenever I am hiring, I also post about it to my personal LinkedIn profile.
Share the job opening with your LinkedIn network as well as other people you know in the industry. 🚀
For example, If I’m looking for a marketer, I also write to my colleagues and friends working in the field, asking them to share the job offer with their networks + recommend good people to reach out to.
Share the job offer with your LinkedIn network
I also like to post about the job openings to different Facebook groups for marketers. There are also online communities such as GitHub for developers where you can share the job offers.
Also, don’t forget to use the help of the team you already have.
You can even set up a company-wide referral bonus 💰, so that people are motivated to share the job offers with their friends and get them to join your team.
8. Do outreach on LinkedIn
Say you have a few good applicants, but you want MORE. 🔥
Doing some headhunting on LinkedIn is a good way to make sure the top people in the market are aware of your job offer.
You don’t even need a paid LinkedIn Premium account to do the outreach. Simply go to LinkedIn, check out the people in top companies in your market and the relevant people working there, and shoot them a message.
I usually send 20+ LinkedIn outreach letters per job opening.
Here’s an example of an outreach email: Keep it straightforward and informative + leave the option to ask some extra questions.
LinkedIn outreach example – Image source
You can also keep it shorter on the first go, and send over additional information once the candidate has replied that they’re interested in hearing more.
Based on my personal experience, doing outreach on LinkedIn and inviting people to join your team feels a lot more personal than seeing a job ad.
9. Test publishing multiple job offers
Another hack for getting more job applicants is to publish multiple job offers with different titles.
You can create two near-identical job openings with different titles, and they will both attract varying candidates.
Around 60% of the applicants for both jobs will most likely duplicate each other, but the remaining 30-40% will be the extra people you managed to bring to your hiring funnel.
For example, if I’m hiring a marketer to MeetFrank, I could publish 2 job openings, one for Content Marketer role and another for Full-stack Marketer role.
10. Make sure to give fast feedback to all applicants
Reputation is everything, especially on the tech job market where top experts know other top experts, and bad recruitment experiences can be shared on GlassDoor.
A lot of job applicants will look up your company on GlassDoor or ask their friends for feedback. If you have a lot of negative reviews, less people will be interested in applying.
People will check out your company reviews
The least you can do as a recruiter or hiring manager is to give timely feedback to all applicants, even the ones that you’re not planning to hire.
If you need a more pragmatic reason for replying to your job applicants than just being a good human being, consider that you may want to hire some of them in the future.
Simply take 1 minute to copy-paste a polite rejection letter or send your applicants information about the next steps.
The best practice is to reply to candidates and their latest feedback at least every 72 hours. Even better if you can do it every 24h.
💎 By being responsive, friendly, and open with your applicants right from the start, you will create a positive feeling towards the company overall. This means a higher likelihood of people completing the home tasks, coming to interviews, and accepting your offer later on.
And that’s it! Test out the above best practices to get more applicants to any role you’re hiring for. Also, you can follow us on Instagram for more cool tips on hiring. 🙃
