Steve Jobs once said, “Hiring the best is your most important job.” And indeed, you wouldn’t entrust the future of your ventures to mediocre people, would you? Steve didn’t and now Apple is one of the most iconic brands in the world. But the question lies therein: how do you find the ‘best’? Moreover, should you do the recruiting yourself or get the help of professionals?

Here are a few tips to get you started:

Examine your company culture

Before you can even begin to look for your next hire, you need to examine your company. Do you work in a casual, laissez-faire environment? Or is your work highly deadline-driven? This self-evaluation will give you a good idea of what type of individual will thrive in your business and will make your search quicker. Hiring for character is just as important as hiring for skill. It is, after all, easier to train someone than to change their attitude.

Hire internally or through people in your network

Perhaps the easiest way to hire is to hire internally. Not only is your candidate already a loyal part of your team, but you are also able to evaluate them in more depth than reading CVs can ever allow you. You can also scout for potential candidates via your current employees. See if they know someone who will work wonders (literally). Plus, it’s not a bad idea to incentivise this process so you can get those leads as soon as you can!

Trawl through LinkedIn

Do you have a LinkedIn profile? Does your company have a LinkedIn presence? If you answer ‘yes’ to both of these, then your life just got easier. LinkedIn has revolutionised the way professionals network. You can trawl through potential candidates’ profiles and send them messages directly or you can post job advertisements (for a fee) and wait for applications to come in. Another good feature of LinkedIn is that you can search for people via groups and skills, and this can save you a lot of time.

Advertise your vacancy

Let your intentions be known and the world will respond. It’s very easy to advertise your vacancy on staple sites such as Seek (for a fee) or Gumtree (for free). Write a clear and simple job description that includes information about your company and the role you’re hiring for. The downside to this is you may not be attracting the correct candidates and it may take you time to scroll through all the CVs in your inbox before you find gold.

Get help from the Professionals

If you’re really time-poor and drowning in a sea of deadlines, keep your head above water by hiring a recruitment agency to do the hard yards for you. There are many agencies that specialise in different industries. Some use old-school hiring strategies and some, like SmartWorker, have a modern and tailor-made approach to recruitment. This can save you valuable time and will give you the best chance of finding that perfect employee.

“If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amateur.” This simple but effective quote really emphasises how important it is to find the perfect person for the job. Fortunately, there are different ways to recruit your next employee such as hiring internally or through your network, advertising on job sites and even bringing in a professional recruitment agency to do the work for you. You can opt to do one or all of these. Your perfect employee is somewhere out there. All you need to do is to reach out.