[This is the first post of the “Hiring for Startups 101” blog series]

I often hear from startups that they don’t see enough (quality) candidates for their open positions and most of the times this is largely due to their passive approach to filing the hiring funnel. Posting ads on Craiglist and other job boards makes sense but is usually not enough in a generally tight market for talent where the best people don’t even look for jobs. Here are a few ideas to pro-actively fill the top of the hiring funnel:

• “Always be hiring”: take every and any opportunity to position your start-up as an interesting company to work for – be it at general networking events, presentations you give, or in media pieces.
• Go where the potential candidates hang out: there are meet-ups for Ruby developers, interaction designers or PR and communications people. There is Startup Weekend, co-working spaces, local hackathons,…. You get the point.
• Offer internships: offering internship positions is one of the best way to build a long-term funnel for any position and a great way to get to know quality candidates very early in their decision process for their future job.
• Build up enough internal resources for talent acquisitions: finding great candidates is often all about hustling and you need the appropriate time and resources within your company to pro-actively identify candidates – think about an internal position within your start-up that does nothing else than focusing on identifying great potential candidates though web research (and check out how aggressively Google is using contractors to do that).
• Use your own employees for referrals: many companies have traditionally leveraged their existing employees to identify suitable candidates but there are now many software tools (e.g. Nexi.me; Careerify; Entelo; TalentBin) available that make “social recruiting” less of an effort for your employees.
• Recruiters: most of the time recruiters are too expensive for start-ups and should only be used for very crucial senior hires. But in case you hire a recruiter, go for a boutique firm that really understands startups and not necessarily the big brands in executive recruiting that might not give you the attention that you need. And look out for recruiters that have adopted their pricing to the financial abilities of start-ups and offer flat search fees (often below $10K per position).

Identifying great candidates and filling the top of the hiring funnel is mostly hustle – don’t wait for great candidates to come to you but use as many outreach strategies as possible to find them.

Related articles

• Hiring for startups 101 – new blog series (wmediaventures.com)
• How to hire for your start-up (wmediaventures.com)
• Hiring Hustle: 5 Tips for Building a Killer Startup Team (mashable.com)