There’s a ton of places to recruit people on the web today, but back in the early 2000’s, it was rudimentary. While you had job sites like monster.com most people on there wanted a salary I simply couldn’t afford, and so I resorted to a popular forum for my industry called webhostingtalk.com
I started posting regularly in the forum, and joined discussions and answered questions where I could. I quickly became friends with other hosting owners and from time to time posted in the job offers section. What I found was interesting. It was easy to spot knowledgeable people who loved helping others, in fact, the community is full of them.
I realized that only people who were passionate about what they did within the industry were the ones devoting their time to answering questions and being a part of the community.
So when I posted a job ad, it was easy to spot these people simply by looking at their forum profile. Some of them never graduated college or even had a high school diploma, but the one thing they all had in common was a shared interest in their particular field.
With this community, I was able to find incredibly smart server administrators who were willing to work for much less money just to be able to work from home. I found new-found dad’s who was wholly committed to making this job work so they could put food on the table.
Now, why am I sharing this? Well, today my current company, SupportNinja has an entire HR department and we throw all the fancy bells and whistles their way, from automated testing and screening tools and a fancy recruitment software called Jazz.
The software, much like others will automatically post the job on a handful of job boards like LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor and much more. However not even the fanciest recruiting software can post on sites or within communities that are specific to your industry.
So my advice to you is if you want to find the most dedicated, independent and intrinsically motivated people, then consider joining the communities, forums and chat channels associated with your industry. That’s where you’ll find the real juggernauts that will help your business scale.
