Startup Hiring on a Budget

Your business is growing and you need to find the next all-star member of your team. They need to be just the right mix of top-notch talent and the perfect cultural fit — and addition to needing them yesterday you have essentially zero budget to devote to the search. Sound familiar? Here are some tips that can help.

Quick, effective, and best of all cheap — here are two tips to help you master startup hiring on a budget.
The recruitment process for a new employee can be extremely expensive and draining at the startup stage, especially if it is mismanaged. The key to succeeding in this situation is to determine a comprehensive plan up front, so you can develop a consistent method of finding, attracting, and ultimately hiring top candidates, even when you have no budget to speak of.
What’s your first course of action? Some blind optimist in the crowd will recommend paying for a job posting on career sites like Career Builder, Indeed, Monster, etc, but this will be a long shot and require you to put a lot of faith in the perfect candidate stumbling across your posting. That can and does happen, but not as reliably as rolling up your sleeves and finding the best candidate yourself.

Two Quick, Easy, and Cheap Ways to Gain Exposure for Open Roles

1) Social Media

When you are recruiting with a limited budget your company brand will become indispensable to attracting the best candidates. Ultimately, the end goal is to have the top qualified candidates knocking on your door, rather than you diving into the haystack in search of the needle. The easiest way to increase your company brand and awareness is to ensure that your company pages on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook are fully up to date and are attracting potential employees and customers to your organization.

• Facebook allows companies to have access to over one billion individuals. Make sure your company has a fully functional and interactive page that will get visitors excited about your company/cause. Facebook will also give you access to the social job app to promote your position.
• LinkedIn will allow you to really hone in on specific profession groups and take part of active discussions within the targeted groups. Having an active company page on LinkedIn helps to lure in the top candidates and increase the exposure of your job posting.
• Twitter is a great way to increase your company’s followers and allow you to highlight current opportunities within you company by use of strategic hash tags like #jobseekers, #jobs, etc. You can get creative and incorporate trending events into your hiring to increase visibility.  This will also open the possibility of increasing brand awareness by sharing content that was created by current employees.

While you’re making sure your social media presence is working for you, you should also look at optimizing your website, particularly in terms of handling mobile traffic. A little preparation now will help you avoid playing catch up in the long run.

2) Get Employees Involved

 
We all know that a large portion of hires come from employee referrals. So why not start there? You have an entire workforce that is fully aware of what it is like to work at your company and what type of employee would be successful in that environment.
Not only should you empower individual team members to contribute to your recruiting efforts, your company as a whole should also look to capitalize on strategic partnerships. A great way to do this is to work with local universities to create an internship program. Not only will this allow you to get hungry and dedicated young professionals into the organization, it will also allow you to gain exposure to the alumni boards of the colleges that you are partnered with. This will not only increase the candidate pool you can review, but open up the door to candidates nationwide.

Looking for More Tips?

Download our free guide to developing and optimizing your own in-house hiring function.

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How does your company handle recruiting with a limited or non-existent budget? I would love to hear creative methods that you have found successful!

Image courtesy of Curtis Perry