This week's episode of Automation Unplugged we’re bringing you a webinar we recorded in August 2024 called “How to Find Top Talent: Strategies for Discovering Your Ideal Candidates.”

About this webinar:

Attracting, hiring, and retaining top talent has long been one of the greatest challenges to growth in the custom integration industry and it remains a pressing issue today.That’s why we’re bringing you valuable insights on talent sourcing & hiring best practices to position your business for hiring success in 2025. The webinar we’re bringing you today is the second in a series of three. The first webinar in this series was released on show #286 on January 8, 2025. Today’s webinar covers proven strategies and tips for defining what your ideal candidates look like, and leveraging your network, job boards, social media, and industry events to find new talent for your team.

You’ll hear from Samantha Hodz, Director of Talent Acquisition Services at Amplify People, One Firefly’s hiring division, and Chris Williams, Director of People & Operations at OneVision.

In the episode, we’ll cover:

• How to define and document your ideal candidate profile in order to source individuals who meet your needs for skill set requirements, experience, and culture.
• How to leverage your existing team and personal networks to seek new talent.
• Best practices for sourcing talent through social media, job boards, industry events, technical and vocational schools, and more.

SEE ALSO: Show #289: Unlock New Opportunities at Light It Up Expo

Transcript

Samantha:

Very exciting to be going live for our second webinar.

Ron:

Sam, we're back. We have Chris in the house.

Chris:

Good to see you guys here, excited for today's topic.

Ron:

This is going to be the Chris and Sam show. I'm only going to stop in here at the beginning to say hi to everybody. And then of course, at the end, I'm going to be your moderator for some Q and A at the end. Sam, are you feeling ready after a webinar one a few weeks ago?

Samantha:

I am. I'm excited to continue. I think we had some good discussion in the first one. So really looking forward to diving deep into the next phase of the process.

Ron:

Awesome. And Chris, we are excited to be collaborating with OneVision and I appreciate you and the OneVision team joining us for this, webinar and helping put this content together.

Chris:

Yeah. Very happy to do so. I've been in this space for six and a half years. I'm excited to bring some of my, insights, and experience here to the conversation and. And also too, Ron, it's just good to get to reconnect with you. I think the last time I saw you in person would have been about five years ago or so, pre COVID. So it's good to get to hop onto a webinar with you.

Ron:

I appreciate that. That would that at one of those conferences you guys used to put on?

Chris:

Yeah, yep. It was the one on Cape Cod here. so that I'm pretty sure that was 2019, I think.

Ron:

That's I remember eating some really good lobster on that, that trip.

Chris:

Lots of good oyster bars.

Ron:

Lots of good oyster bars, for sure. All right, so I see some names here. I am mindful of time. It is, as the, great Richard Gleicks would say, the time is the time. And so it is two oh two. So I say we go ahead and get started. We are here folks for our second webinar in our hiring success summer series. Appreciate you all joining. My name is Ron Callis, CEO and founder here at One Firefly. And, the, title of today's course is How to Find Top Talent, Strategies for Discovering Your Ideal Candidates. And, I'll be your moderator. So I'm actually gonna sign off of my audio and video here, and I'm going to leave you in the very capable hands of Sam from our Amplify People team and Chris from the team at OneVision, and they're going to take you through some awesome content. So again, I appreciate everybody that's been tuning in, and I will just make the note, make sure to write down your questions. And drop them into the bottom screen here where it says chat or Q and A. You can go to either place, submit any of those questions. And at the end of our 30 minute session here, I'm going to read through those questions and have Sam and Chris, our experts, field those questions. Thank you, Sam. And thank you, Chris.

Chris:

Thanks, Ron.

Samantha:

Thank you, Ron. Hello, everybody. Thank you for joining us for this second webinar. For some of you, this may be a refresher, but for those that weren't able to attend our first webinar, my name is Sam Hotz, and I am the Director of Talent and Acquisition Services for Amplify People. I've spent about 15 years in the talent space and joined Amplify People, which launched in 2023, a couple of months ago. And it was really designed to be the one stop talent solution for the custom integrations industry. Really born out of years of optimizing hiring strategies for One Firefly. It was really just created to help solve some problems and serve the industry's toughest talent challenges. And with that said, Chris, mind sharing a little bit about yourself?

Chris:

Yeah, happy to do so, Sam. Good afternoon, everyone. Good to be with you here and excited to spend a half hour together talking about a topic that's very near and dear to my heart and my daily activities from responsibilities here at OneVision. For those who don't know, OneVision, we have been in this space for a long time, and we really help, service or help installers and installation companies really jumpstart their service departments, and be able to expand their capabilities in terms of providing high quality, consistent support experiences to their customers. And of course, we also help them generate revenue in at the same time in doing so. I've been with our company here for six and a half years. I was employee number 21 when I started at OneVision. This would have been back in January of 2018. Fast forward six and a half years later, we're about 73 employees now. And not only are we a strong base in Boston, but we're also distributed across the U. S. with our employee workforce. And we work with about 100 different integrators across the country these days.

Samantha:

Wonderful. Thank you, Chris, for sharing a little bit about that. And so now we'll get into why we're all here, just to cover today's agenda and give you a little insight as to what's to come. We're going to spend some time defining your ideal candidate; leveraging your referral network; talk about how to use talent sourcing platforms; and additionally, how to build some community relationships. So with that being said, what we covered in webinar one, which you can watch on demand, once you receive a copy of the recording for today, you'll see that little QR code, but we covered how to attract top talent. So really defining your company culture. crafting engaging job descriptions and job ads and how to optimize online touch points for candidate research. So with that being said, I always like to kick things off with hearing from you all. So we'd like to start with a poll. I'd like you to think about your team today. Where are you finding the majority of those that have joined your team? You'll see some answers, some options there. Give everybody a moment. These are some pretty standard and time tested ways to attract talent, but we know that people are getting creative nowadays.

Samantha:

There may be something not listed that you'd like to highlight.

Chris:

Yeah, I would have loved to have had other and then fill in the blank so that we can see what the other resource is. I'm always looking for new channels, new avenues.

Samantha:

We all are a hundred percent. Well, we will go ahead and it looks like a majority of you all have participated and no surprise job boards seem to be the most popular option that I see there. And some of you are utilizing word of mouth, or employee referrals. Great. If you've been able to capitalize on them, excellent job. And some of you have utilized a talent partner, which is another, strong strategy because we know this can be a time consuming and overwhelming process. So thank you all for those of you that have shared. So I'd like to dive into a couple of things, but while we're doing that, I want to remind each of you, Rebecca, if you don't mind, perfect, hiring people is an art. It is not a science. Resumes can't tell you whether someone will fit into a company's culture. You'll see Howard Schultz. CEO of Starbucks. This is a famous quote of his and I couldn't agree more. It is definitely, if you are just looking at check boxes, you are missing a key component. I know we touched on that in webinar one, but it really is an art form that requires a lot of due diligence, prepping, planning, and thought. It's not something you want to just throw against the wall, see who sticks long term. To protect that company's culture and really protect the investment you're making and growing your businesses respectfully. And so what I'd like to do is really talk about how to define a candidate profile. Again, in webinar one, we touched on a job ad and a job, description. This is something that is very different. A job ad is for public consumption. Something you'd put up on a job board. A job description is really an internal document that you can distribute to your team to leverage them. Let them know you're looking, why you're looking. This is something that is really for yourself. If you're responsible for the hiring process exclusively, or maybe you and a hiring manager, somebody that would be managing this person. And this is a very kind of restricted access document that will define who you are looking for. So this will go over things like technical skills and experience that you'd like your ideal candidate to have. This is going to really require you to reflect on the current A players on your team. Those that you would really love to replicate, get more of on your team. What are those attributes that they have? Why are they so successful in your organization? What makes them excel at their job? And what does a good culture fit look like to you? Now there aren't really a lot of restrictions on what you can put on this document, but when you're talking about technical skills and experience, again, because this is internal, it could be, you've had success from a certain region or people with a certain background, maybe coming out of a certain national retailer or something like that. It is okay to put those things on this document. Again, this is your dream profile, if you could write it up and pick it out of the bunch. And then again, those soft skills are really going to be the things that are going to require you to think a lot more. One thing before we dive into the examples that I want to make sure I cover is on this document, you really can focus on things like geographic preferences. You want to stay away from anything that would fall into the demographic category. So anything gender, race, religion, age, anything like that. You do not want to write this down. You want to treat this document as if it would be okay if somebody came across it, but it is okay to be really specific in those desired soft skills. What type of communicator do you want? Is it important that this person is adaptable? Is it important that they're dependable? If punctuality is a key reason that you've made adjustments to your team in the past, that's something you can put on this list. If it's a certain style of communication, somebody who's more passive or more assertive, that is Absolutely okay to put in here. And you'll see, you can break it up. It'll differ whether you're looking for somebody like a technician. Those soft skills are probably going to be a little bit different than if you need somebody to represent you in a sales capacity. Somebody in sales, you may want somebody that's self motivating, independent. It is okay to put down somebody that, is able to connect with a variety of people, come with their own book of business. It is okay if you are in a culture where you're really looking for somebody that is a shark, it is okay to put on there that you are looking for a shark, somebody who is assertive, and professionally aggressive. But if your culture and your clients tend to respond better to somebody that plays the long game, is a more consultative approach. That is what you should put on this document. You cannot go out there and find what you're looking for if you can't articulate it. And if you are looking to bring somebody in like a talent partner, the more you are able to describe your ideal, the easier it will be to partner with somebody to attract those specific qualities and get those screened specifically for your organization.

Chris:

If I could jump in on that, I like the direction that you're taking here with us and the focus that you're putting on thinking about other people that are in your company who are already rock stars. Here at OneVision, we did that when we were thinking about our company values. What do we actually hold ourselves accountable to in terms of our day to day actions, the way we look at things and make decisions. We use that same framework for hiring really good candidates. Now, when we think about the personality that we want them to have, when we think about those soft skills, the most practical and best way to do that is to think about the you already have on your team. That is the easiest guideline for someone to be able to follow when thinking about not only what the job description looks like, but what's the profile of that person. And the reason that's so important is you're going to see so many different candidates come through your inbox. People applying through job boards, people applying through social media, and it's going to be really, important for you to go and get beyond what's written on these resumes, and think about this person who you're going to be working with. You're going to be calling them a teammate. And the best and most practical way for you to be able to do that is to think about the rock stars you already have and draw parallels between them and who else you'd want to add to your team.

Samantha:

Great points, Chris. Absolutely. And I think, we're going to touch on that in a minute. Rebecca, if you want to go to the next slide, you made a fantastic point, which is no one will ever check all of your boxes on a resume. A resume that is 75 percent interesting is worth a conversation when it comes through. And having that ideal candidate profile will let you know, does this person fill in the 25 percent that I didn't see on paper? What's the story behind the individual? If you're looking through, to your point, Chris, a hundred resumes that have come in, you've got to have some. some idea how to differentiate. So your first step is, do they have the background? Do they have the technical skills that I'm looking for? Did they work in our industry or an adjacent industry that may be a transferable skill? But then beyond that, what is the story behind them is really what this candidate profile is intended to help you fill in. That other 25 percent. Would they fit in with your team? Do they hold the values of your organization when you're having conversations with them? Do you get the same feeling in discussing with them the opportunity that you got when you hired your last rock star? Do they approach things in the same way as the rock stars on your team. And I think equally as important, it will allow you to also understand what has not worked. Who are the people that were not rock stars in the past, in your organization that you've had to transition away from, and does this person fit some of those characteristics to help you shy away from them? Or do they really attract you to those rock stars? So I think it's really important to understand both sides of the coin, but this kind of candidate profile is really designed to fill that gap, that story, beyond the person on paper. And so once you've got all of that, and I know we're asking a lot, and this process is time consuming to develop a job ad, a job description, a candidate profile, but it is worth it because it will allow you to have clear focus and vision when you are pushing forward in this. And so once you have all of this, it is the time to really leverage your referral network. So some things to really think about when you're talking about your referral network is you want to distribute those job descriptions that we talked about to the entire organization so they know you're hiring. A great tool to have in your toolkit is to create a referral bonus program for your internal employees so they feel motivated to share potential candidates. Maybe it's people they've worked with in the past and they gelled really well and they've been looking for a chance to bring them over. You could feel something remarkably quickly that way. You'll see we've got an example here of somebody that posted that they were hiring and it was reposted on LinkedIn by somebody in their network to get some more exposure. And this happens when you practice regular network reciprocation. And what we mean by that, you all might have heard something like deposits and withdrawals. You want to make sure that you're actively making deposits in the people in your network, before you ask them for anything in return. So do something like this regularly. If you see somebody is hiring that maybe isn't a direct competitor in your market, if you've got somebody in your network who maybe worked for you in the past, but relocated, pass that name along to somebody, to help your former employee and somebody else in the industry. And the more you engage in making those deposits the more it will be reciprocated when you go out and make it known that you are looking. So practicing regular network reciprocation, whether on LinkedIn, whether picking up the phone, and it doesn't necessarily always have to surround hiring. This is just in general. If you want to pick up the phone and call somebody and say happy birthday, or if you noticed a work anniversary and you want to shout that out, just checking on people and remaining engaged, and active with them in your network will again, allow that to come back to you tenfold. So just something I always like to touch on once you've gone through the steps and are now prepared to engage in the act of sourcing candidates. And so with that being said, Chris, I think you wanted to talk about placing those job ads online and what that looks like.

Chris:

Yeah. So far in session one, and then for the last 20 minutes, we've really been focused on getting all of your homework done and getting you to the point where you're actually now ready to post, job ads online. As you can tell from session one and the last 20 minutes, there's a whole lot of prep work that you want to do in order to set yourself up for success. Now, once you've hit this point, once you're ready to actually post job ads online, the first question is where do you even want to go? There are myriad sources and opportunities online today for you to have to sift through. And I'm hopeful that by the end of this session, that between Sam and I, we can at least guide you to the best resources so that you can get through all the white noise that's out on the internet and really just go with the resources that are going to be the best tools for you in your hiring efforts. First, what's the difference between social media and job boards? So let's just start with defining, what each of these actually are. A resource like LinkedIn would be an example of social media. LinkedIn is great for job ads, but that's not the only thing that LinkedIn is good for. In fact, LinkedIn is about a whole lot more than just posting a job ad. Facebook, Instagram, again, these are Twitter or X. These are examples of social media platforms where yes, you can post a job ad, but again, it's not the primary purpose of those social media platforms. And so you want to keep that in mind when you're thinking about where you actually want to post your job ads. My advice to you is I'm not saying don't use social media, you should, but again, just don't think that's going to be your primary resource for being able to post a job ad and get people's attention. Job boards are things that you've probably heard of before like Glassdoor, or ZipRecruiter, Monster, these are boards that are dedicated to just helping employers be able to find good candidates and vice versa. So both of these resources are important and they can play different roles in terms of helping you find the right candidates and making sure that the right candidates are also finding you. I have found in my experience, and I'll back up a second here for those who don't know OneVision very well. We do help our partners find talent. The reason I'm on this particular session here today is because I don't just think about us finding talent for ourselves. We also, as a company, we help our integrators who do business with us. We have a recruiting team here in house that we make available to our partners to help them find really good talent. And in our experience, we have found that you can get certain candidates on social media and you get other candidates for other positions on job boards themselves. When thinking about social media, such as LinkedIn, we have found that you can find really good candidates for operations positions or sales positions. You can find them on platforms like LinkedIn. So whenever we are helping one of our partners find an operations manager, or a new salesperson, we will make sure that we are giving a lot of attention to getting those jobs for those positions posted onto platforms like LinkedIn. We know from our experience that we're going to find really good candidates on a platform like LinkedIn. Vice versa though, we're not going to find installers or technicians on LinkedIn, that's just not where they hang out as regularly, but where they do hang out are on job boards. So when we're helping a partner find an installer or a technician, we will pay attention to job boards and make sure that we are keeping our job ads as toward the top of the page, as possible, refreshing those job ads every week. So that when candidates for those positions are going on to a board, such as Indeed or Monster, then we know that we're going to have our job ads available to those people. So when you are thinking about the positions that you're hiring, think about where you're going to find those candidates. And again, in our experience, if you're looking for a service related role, you're going to have better luck on a job board if you're looking for an ops or a salesperson or something that's not service related, you'll find you'll have good luck on places like LinkedIn. By the way, that doesn't mean you avoid job boards for those positions. You want to be, you want to do both for those positions. It's not one or the other. Social media. So when you're thinking about what you're going to put onto social media, it's important that you don't just put the job ad and a link. Now that's going to be very sterile for social media and social media is all about not being sterile. Whether it's LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram or X people go on there for a variety of reasons beyond just job ads. So if you're going to put a job ad on social media and you want it to be impactful and you want it to be helpful to you, then think about what you're actually saying and what kind of context you're giving around that job ad. Some companies do this really well. Others don't even think about it at all. Our company personally, we focus on LinkedIn really heavily for our job ads and our company culture and such. But given the nature of our business, we don't focus as heavily on Facebook or Instagram. Those of you who are on this session, you might find your situation to be different from ours. You may find that it really does pay off to have a strong local social media presence within your market. Sam, I'd love for you to touch on this. I think this is something that you probably think a lot about in terms of your work.

Samantha:

Absolutely. I think that you covered some great points. I think it's really important to give a full and complete picture. If the only time again, we talked about reciprocation. Very similar kind of mindset when we're talking about social media. If the only time that you are going on social media is to post a job, nobody is going to pay attention. That is going to cause questions, more than provide answers or a clear cut indication as to why somebody should reach out to you. But if you're posting things like you'll see here, a trip, a company trip to a baseball game, and things that are, really speaking to an overall company culture, and you're highlighting that by activating that purple banner on LinkedIn, for instance, that says you're hiring, those two pieces together really will catch the eye of candidates and make them pause and look at what's happening here. Oh, they went to a baseball game and they're hiring. Let me see what they have going on. So it's all about showing a complete picture, and not just putting something out there when it's time to make a hire.

Chris:

Yeah, I, in the poll that we did at the top of the hour, I noticed that no one checked off social media as their resource for finding talent recently. That's not a surprise to me, but what you do want to think about is that candidates may not be using your social media as the primary gateway to find you for a job, but they probably are using your social media to validate what they're seeing. So if they see your job ad on a job board, let's use a ZipRecruiter. For example, if they see your job ad on ZipRecruiter, I guarantee you, they're probably taking a few extra minutes and Googling your company. And one of the first things that's going to pop up other than your company website is your company's LinkedIn profile, or the LinkedIn profiles of your employees. So to the point that Sam is making, and that we're reiterating here, even if you don't use social media as a primary resource for posting jobs, just be aware that candidates are vetting and validating you based on what they're seeing on your social media. So keep that in mind that even if you're not using LinkedIn or other social media platforms to post jobs, you still want to make sure that you're thinking about the content that you're putting out there and making sure that it's positioning your company in the best light. So that when these candidates go to validate and pressure who you are, they're going to be, they're going to be glad to see what they're reading. We've mentioned different job boards, here, and I also mentioned earlier, there are myriad opportunities out there. so to cut through the white noise, if you're really wondering, all right, what are the key job boards for me to think about? Now, let me just cut through the hundreds of them that are out there and just focus on the ones that are going to give me the biggest bang for my buck. These are the ones that you want to pay attention to here on the screen. Now, these are the big five. If you're covering these four job boards plus LinkedIn as a social media platform, then it's a safe bet that you're going to find the candidates that you're trying to get in front of, and vice versa. On the job boards themselves, so you've got your job posting, but oftentimes, there are additional questions that a job board may ask you. If you've ever gone on to Indeed or ZipRecruiter, they'll go through a series of pages where they're asking you questions about things. And sometimes you've covered that material in your actual job posting, sometimes you haven't. Either way, whether you've put it into the job posting or you're answering questions that are being given to you by the job board, make sure that you're thinking about these points that are on the screen here in front of you, especially the clear call to action. Make sure that they know exactly, all right, here's what we're looking for, but here's what you need to do. Submit this resume. If you want a cover letter, if you require a cover letter, make that very clear on the job board and say that you won't consider someone's resume without a cover letter. So if that is important to you, make sure that you make it very clear and reiterate it on these job boards. And then, of course, be very specific about the role and the culture itself. You'll see here on the screen in front of you, this is a sample of a job posting that we do here at our company. So this is literally taken straight off of our company website and off of Indeed. You can see the style that we take. Now, we take a very conversational style with our job postings. I have found that candidates respond extremely well when they can read a job posting and when they read it, it's like you're having a conversation with them. And in that conversation with them, we are being very, clear about what kind of role this is. What are we looking for? What would this role do in a nutshell? We have gotten extremely favorable responses from candidates when we have this sort of an approach in our job postings. And the reason why is because most companies don't take a lot of time and effort with their job postings. They tend to be very sterile. They tend to use a lot of company jargon and lingo. That a candidate may not understand. And so we think about that here at our company, and we make sure that we're very clear, very specific, about what we're looking for. And we, translate that in a way that the candidate can understand and get excited by what they would be doing with us. By the way, job boards are a ton of work. Just even using one job board can really drain a lot of time and a lot of bandwidth. So if you are going to use one, which again is very beneficial to you and I highly recommend it, make sure that you are actually blocking off time for you on a daily basis to go in there and review the resumes and then the ones that you like set them up for screening interviews, etc. If you don't do that, you're going to have great candidates that are applying and then they're dying on the vine. Because you're not giving the time and the effort and the resources that need to go in to actually managing your job post. Some job posts can get 300 applications within two or three days. And that can be extremely daunting when you look at that and think, Oh my God, I've got to get through this many applications to screen. Which by the way, I'm just going to make a shameless plug here on behalf of Sam and myself, that's why we do what we do. This is why Sam and Amplify People make themselves available to manage this process for you. That's why OneVision does this for our partners. We understand how much work and time and effort goes into it. So we have an in house recruiting team, much like Sam has an in house recruiting team, to be able to do all of this type of work for our partners. If you are going to do this on your own, there are software tools out there to do that. They're called Applicant Tracking Systems or ATS for short. These ATSs, or these software tools will allow you to populate your job posting out there to numerous job boards. And then the people who apply to them are, they all get aggregated in through that software into one place. This keeps you from having to log in individually into Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, Monster, and have to have disparate or numerous channels where you're communicating with candidates. And ATS allows you to aggregate all of that into one channel and then you can communicate with those candidates, regardless of what job site they posted into through, and be able to make this a much more streamlined process for you. The screen here in front of you is a snapshot from the ATS that we use at our company. It's called Recruitee. ATSs don't have to be expensive. There are expensive ones out there and you can see some of them on the list here. Bamboo is a very, very expensive one, but Recruity is a very cheap one. I think off the top of my head, I think we pay maybe three or 400 bucks a month to use Recruity. So something like Recruity is very cost effective for someone who wants to be able to do their own hiring, but also wants to streamline it and make it really efficient. Finally, it's not just job boards or social media that you can use. Find talent in your own community. We do this here at our company. When I need to hire a tech, a support agent for our company, we will go into Best Buy. We'll go into Apple Stores where there are employees who are already very interested in the type of technology that we service and support. And you can find really good talent within your local community. It's not just Best Buy or Apple Stores. You can find local programs, community colleges, industry trade shows as well that you can go to and find good talent. It does require bandwidth. You have to carve off time to do that, but if you're willing to carve out the time, you can pay dividends for you in terms of finding really good talent. We have found some of our best rock stars literally by going into places like Best Buy and Apple Store, undercover, I literally will send our employees in and have them pretend to be a shopper who doesn't know what they're looking for. And they engage with the employees there and they find the good ones. And when they find the good ones that engage with them back, then they bring that employee over to me, they refer that employee to me, and then I reach out and have a recruiting conversation with them about joining our company. So something like that can be something that, you, who are watching this, you might think about replicating that within your local community. We've covered a lot of ground here this afternoon, we went just a few minutes over, but I know this isn't the end of the conversation that we're having. So Sam, I'll turn it back over to you.

Samantha:

Thank you, Chris. I know there's a lot of detail and we could probably, we do this day in and day out, so we could probably have gone another three hours on some of these topics alone. But we appreciate you hanging in those few extra moments with us. And just a reminder, guys, this is part two of a three part series. So the next, webinar is going to be on September 17th at one o'clock. and I'm going to be joined by Paul, who's the VP of Education and training at CEDIA. And we're going to be really talking about now that you've put it out in the world that you're looking, your network knows, your organization knows, it's on job boards, how do you evaluate what comes through to find that top talent? So really going to the next phase of the process. If you have any questions, you want to dive deeper into anything that we've covered today, you can reach out. I know Chris will make himself available and so you'll be able to reach out. I know we've got his, email address and phone number on there. You can also check out their website. And same with us here at amplify people. Please reach out, ask questions, and feel free to engage with us. And again, if you would like to have a free talent discussion, dive into any of this further, reach out and schedule a time to talk. Would love to speak with anybody, and engage in more conversation, but we appreciate it. We know we ran a little bit over today. Anybody would like to hang tight, and get some answers to some questions that have been asked, please feel free to do so. We understand if some of you have to run, but thank you so much for your time today.

Ron:

I was going to say Sam and Chris, excellent job, fielding all of that content. We do have questions, but Chris, I saw that you were just about to speak.

Chris:

Yeah, I just wanted to address one from Tyler that I saw in the Q and A. Rebecca, I may be getting ahead of you here. So forgive me if I'm stepping on your toes by answering Tyler's question, but Tyler posted a question about the cost of being able to post online and how can you do that efficiently? So to Tyler, LinkedIn has an option for you called Recruiter Lite. There's Standard Recruiter and then there's Recruiter Lite. The Recruiter Standard package is indeed expensive. it runs in the thousands and thousands of dollars. However, Recruiter Lite is a great and cost effective tool. I believe our company pays about 150 bucks a month to use Recruiter Lite. And that allows us up to three job postings at a time. So LinkedIn can be a very cost effective tool for you to use without worrying that you're going to pay a whole lot more money than it's worth. And then also, ATSs like the one that we use will push out job postings without us having to pay extra for those job postings. So for us using Recruitee software, we pay about 400 bucks a month. But we, I don't have to pay extra above and beyond that to get our job postings out. So there are ATSs and things like Recruiter Lite that can be very cost effective for you.

Samantha:

Absolutely. And Chris, thank you so much for sharing. I think touching on kind of the second part of that question, it was about posting on all five could be remarkably expensive. And that is a hundred percent true. We want you to focus on what works for the role you are sourcing for. So if that is LinkedIn, that's where we recommend putting your resources. If it's LinkedIn and using some free social media, do that. If it's a job that would be Indeed or ZipRecruiter, utilize the one that is showing the greatest return for you. Not necessarily all five at the same time, and that does take some trial and error. And there are a variety, to Chris's points, LinkedIn has a couple of options for how they price out their services. Indeed has different methods for pricing out their services as well. You can do a free job post. You can sponsor an ad, you can pay per click or per application start. So it's really about finding the right recipe that works for you. So thank you so much for asking that question. Good, feedback.

Ron:

A couple, two more questions here. And again, I appreciate when it wants to stay, I'm just going to feel these and we'll capture these on the video if you need to leave early and we'll send you the recording. But John sent in, if I'm only hiring for one role, is an applicant tracking system worth the expense? At what point does it become worth it to invest in that type of software? Sam, I don't know if you want to start?

Samantha:

Sure. Great question. Thank you for asking, John. Absolutely. If you are doing a one off, it's probably something you can manage without investing in any sort of additional resource. But if that one off turns into one a month or two a quarter, even, it does save you time. Even though it is an investment, you've got to balance it about how much money is your time worth versus the time savings the organization of an ATS provides you. It really streamlines things. And so if you're doing one or two hires a year, probably not something that you need to invest in. But if that ramps up and you find yourself even doing two or three hires at a time, even on the short term, it's worth taking a look at how you could utilize one of these programs and platforms to really streamline your process.

Ron:

Awesome. Chris, I'm going to throw this last one to you. This one's from Susan. She says, if I, the business owner, don't have time to manage hiring, who in my company should do it instead? So it sounds like it's a delegation question.

Chris:

Yeah, for sure. Great question. Thanks for that, Susan. if you have someone who's like an operations person in your company, or maybe an admin or executive assistant, they can take a lot of the work off of your shoulders from a logistics perspective. So if you have a person like that in your company already, you have confidence in them, they can manage the logistics and then direct the good candidates over to you. And then you can take over the hiring process at that point, if you wish, or if you really have a lot of confidence in them, you can even allow them to actually manage the hiring process beyond just doing the screening and the logistics of setting up interviews. I would also recommend that you involve the hiring manager. So if you're hiring a position, and that position reports to someone other than you, make sure that you involve that hiring manager. You may not necessarily want the hiring manager to lead the entire hiring process. After all, having a second pair of eyes is always a good thing. But certainly the hiring manager can take a lot of that bandwidth off of your shoulders as well if you don't have an operations or administrative type person.

Ron:

Brilliant. Well, that's, that's all the questions that I see. If anyone else has questions, feel free to reach out to Chris directly or Sam directly. And, again, Sam and Chris want to say, excellent job. Appreciate you so much, Rebecca. I see your name on screen there. Appreciate you behind the scenes making this happen. And everyone stay tuned for the next webinar. It'll be after CEDIA. It'll be our third webinar in this summer hiring series and we're going to sign off. Appreciate you all. Hope you all have a wonderful close to your summer and we'll see many of you at CEDIA in a few weeks. Thanks everybody.

Chris:

Bye guys.

Samantha:

Thank you.

Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing in the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

Resources and links from the interview:

• Amplify People Webpage
• Hiring Success Webinar Series