Smart recruiting

Your employees are one of the biggest components to your business. If you aren't hiring the right employees, it will be difficult for you to build up strong relationships with your customers. Hiring the right employees comes down to how well you are able to recruit people and interview the right ones.

Where are you currently recruiting? Are you heading to college campuses to talk students about working for your company? Have you tried using recruiting web sites to find employees? Recruiting employees after this manner can start to get expensive so you should try another method and that is to use social media sites.

Using social media sites join the discussion boards and blogs so you can carry on conversations with some of the up and coming students in the industry. Talk to them about their ideas and generally pick their brain. If you see that they can add something to your industry you should give them a call and set up an interview.

Cost is at the basis of several business decisions. When you do your recruiting online, you will not be spending nearly as much as you do if you take a week and head to some of the major universities in your state. Most of the job recruiting sites will only charge you if you send emails to potential candidates. If you do hire someone off their site you will need to pay a fee of about 20 to 30 percent. It's a great way to expand your recruiting pool instead of being limited to a few close schools.

If you don't want to pay for recruiting online, you can always go the route of many other employers and that is to bust into the social media world and talk to young recruits. Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace are great places to talk to potential recruits, but you need to be weary about the information they post on there. Since these are social networking sites, many of the users are looking for friendships and they are sharing personal information about their latest weekend party instead of their ideas and philosophies on your industry. Of course you will have a few job candidates that will participate in the discussion boards and other places where they debate things that pertain to your industry and this is where you can find some great job candidates. Keep in mind that you are going to be doing all of the hard work to find the job candidate on social media sites.

Online recruiting sites like LinkedIn will provide you with a number of resumes you can browse through and they will even link you with some potential employees that they feel match your criteria. You don't need to do nearly as much work, but you will be charged for it. In a down economy, saving pennies will help and it may be time to switch to a social media site and do more work to find your job candidates instead.

A great way to find new recruits is to ask for referrals. Talk to your existing employees and find out if they know anyone that may be good for the job. Referrals are often the best way to find great employees. You don't have to worry about the pre-screening process as much because someone you have come to respect and trust will vouch for them and that will say a lot about their character.

There are a number of ways you can go about recruiting your employees. If you haven't tried online recruiting, now is a great time to get started so you can expand your workforce and bring in some new, young talent.