How to Find Employees: The Complete Guide

Each part of the hiring process comes with its own challenges. Finding quality employees can be one of the tougher parts for many managers.

Insight Global has been around since 2001—meaning we’ve been finding employees every day for businesses of all sizes for more than 20 years. That translates to a lot of expertise in the staffing world—and we’re ready to share it with you!

In 2022 alone, we placed more than 50,000 candidates at thousands of companies from small businesses to Fortune 1000 brand names. And we sourced hundreds of thousands more for consideration by hiring managers across North America and beyond.

Within this guide to find employees, we’ll cover many ways to find the staffers you need, from creating compelling job descriptions to using social media and referral programs to find candidates.

Here’s everything this guide to finding employees covers:

Determining what kind of worker your need for the role(s)
Creating compelling job descriptions and requisitions
Advertising the job opening to prospective candidates
Using a staffing agency to help source candidates
How to create a strong LinkedIn brand as part of your recruiting plan
Developing an employee referral program to reward current workers who recommend candidates

You can access our free downloadable guide How to Find the Best Employees for Your Business to dig even deeper into the subject! And click on each headline to read the full blog of each topic!

Let’s get into the guide.

When to Hire a Temporary Worker vs. a Permanent Worker

Before starting the quest to find employees for your job opening, it’s key to first determine what kind of employee you need for the role: a temporary one or a permanent one.

While a permanent worker is someone who works for your organization, is paid by you, and is intended to stay on long-term, a temporary employee provides short-term solutions for businesses and is often paid as a contractor or by a staffing firm on your behalf.

You might have a temporary worker on your team to:

Cover sudden increases in workloads and expectations
Support special projects
Fill in for permanent staff on a long leave or project

They’re often hired through staffing or temp agencies and paid directly by that agency—though they may work in your office and with your teams. Companies sometime use temporary contracts as tests to determine the need for permanent positions down the road.

How to Write a Job Description

Now that you know what kind of employee you need, it’s time to write the job description. It needs to be compelling and attract the right kind of candidates for the role. Too broad, and you’ll end up sifting through dozens of unqualified candidates. Too narrow, and you might not find the right mix of skills and culture fit.

Some things to include in a great job description are:

Job title
Job summary
Responsibilities and duties of the role
Necessary (and optional) qualifications and skills
Pay and benefits
Location of the job
Length of the job (also why it’s important to find out if you need a temporary employee)
About Us or Why Work with Us section

For more information about how to write a compelling job description and access to a free job description template, download Insight Global’s Complete Guide to Finding the Best Employees for Your Business!

How to Write a Job Requisition

Once you have your job description buttoned up, it might be time to get your job requisition ready. A job requisition—also known as a job req—is a document submitted to human resources that requests permission to create a new position or fill a vacancy. Not every company will need one, so if yours doesn’t, please feel free to skip ahead.

On top of the job description, the job req will feature details like:

Who the hiring manager is and what team they’ll be on
Justification for the new hire
Type of position (full-time, part-time, contract, etc.)
Ideal start date

And lots of other relevant details to the job and company.

Our Complete Guide to Finding Employees has a free job requisition template, too! (Your HR team may have one, but we have a full chapter dedicated just to job reqs!)

DOWNLOAD: Free Job Requisition Template for Finding Employees

How to Advertise Your Job Opening

Alright. You have all you need to advertise your job, but where do you do that?

Best practices have evolved over the 20-plus years we’ve been in the staffing industry—and rapidly in recent years. Some of the most common ways to advertise a job opening in 2023 include:

Building a LinkedIn brand and using it for recruiting (more on that later)
Posting on popular job boards
Using a staffing agency
Building a pipeline of qualified candidates with local colleges, universities, and past applicants
Glassdoor and other company review sites
Other social media
Old school methods like store front and local radio advertising

We detail all of this and more, like how to advertise with a smaller budget, in Chapter 4 of our Complete Guide to Finding the Best Employees for Your Business.

What is a Staffing Agency?

We’ve talked about staffing agencies a lot. That makes sense, given we are one!

In its simplest form, a staffing agency is a company that finds employees for other employees! They’ll often do so on a temporary or permanent basis. If companies just need staff on a temporary basis, they’ll be employed by the staffing company and deployed for a set amount of time to the company that needs their services.

On top of staff augmentation, a good staffing company will offer other services. Insight Global, for example, offers:

Professional services (talent and tech services that help transform our clients’ businesses)
DEI consulting (diversity, equity, and inclusion training solutions)
Culture consulting (culture change solutions and team experiences)
Executive search (finding executive and C-suite leadership for companies)

Some agencies work in one specific industry—like information technology (IT) or healthcare—but many staffing agencies work across industries, filling roles for businesses of all kinds and all sizes.

We also know a staffing agency is more than just a partner who finds employees for you. Here’s what one of our executives said about staffing agencies:

Staffing agencies make hiring easy! They bring value to both job seekers and employers. They elevate your company. And they inspire you and others to do the same.

Read Chapter 5 of our Find Employees guide for more testimonials about staffing agencies!

5 Reasons to Work with a Staffing Agency

Closing out our conversations on staffing agencies, here are five reasons to work with them:

Get access to quality candidates: Staffing agencies have access to a large pool of job seekers actively in the market for work. We utilize established screening methods to identify those who are the best fit for the job. Rather than post a job and hope for the best candidates to apply, a staffing company will access active and passive qualified candidates for you.
Hire quickly: Hiring managers report the average time to hire is six weeks, and it’s often longer than that! Staffing agencies can cut this time down by doing most of the leg work of the hiring process for you! Speaking of…
Streamline the hiring process: Staffing agencies can handle most of the hiring process for you, including reviewing resumes, screening candidates, scheduling interviews, and even paying the workers (if they’re on temporary contracts)!
Save money: Hiring the right kind of candidate can save you money in not having to restart the job process, not take away time from employees from doing their current jobs, and a slew of other reasons
Improve retention rates: By contracting with a staffing firm, you can improve your employee retention rate with both temporary placements and temporary-to-permanent placements. Temporary workers can alleviate the heavy workload placed on full-time employees. By avoiding burnout, more employees choose to stay with your business.

Using LinkedIn for Recruiting

As we mentioned in a previous section, finding employees with LinkedIn is one of the most popular forms of recruiting out there!

It’s important for both you and your company to have a strong LinkedIn presence if you want to use the platform—with its 260 million users—to find employees.

In Chapter 7 of our guide, we dive into topics like:

How to set up a LinkedIn company page
What LinkedIn plans you can use
Tips for growing your LinkedIn connections
How to use features like Groups and InMail properly

Download the guide here!

Building an Employee Referral Program

The final chapter of our guide to finding employees covers building an employee referral program. These programs encourage employees to refer their peers for applicable open positions at their current employer, and they can be extremely effective in recruiting top talent.

They’re effective because they can:

Improve the quality of your hires
Save money in the recruiting process
Increase retention
Speed up the hiring process

And they have benefits for both employees and employers.

Don’t forget to download our Complete Guide to Finding the Best Employees for Your Business, where we go through steps on how to create an effective employee referral program!

Get Started Finding Employees Today

The post just scratches the surface with how to find employees in today’s competitive job landscape.

We hope it’s helped set you on the right path to finding great employees for your business. And don’t forget to download the corresponding guide, which has templates, tips, and advice from experts who’ve been sourcing employees for more than 20 years for our clients.

If you ever need help with the hiring process, let us know! You can contact us directly, and we’ll reach out in as little as 10 minutes to find out more about your hiring needs.