77% of HR pros face talent shortages and skills gaps. 60% reported low applicant volume, 55% lost candidates to competitors, and 46% dealt with ghosting. These stats highlight the need for a master plan that helps recruiters find best-fit employees in seconds.
This guide shows how to find employees faster and smarter, from reaching passive talent to staying one step ahead of your competitors. Plus, the right channels and supporting tools.
7 Proven Steps to Find Employees in 2025
These 7 steps to get employees are based on insights from industry reports, recruiter interviews, and real-world hiring data.
We’ve broken them down into a practical sequence that reflects how top-performing teams attract and hire the right talent today.
Step 1: Define the Role with Clear Skills & Expectations
To find the right employees, it's essential to clearly define what you need. A vague job description leads to confusion and misalignment.
Focus on outlining the role’s objectives, responsibilities, and necessary skills. Highlight expected outcomes and the criteria for measuring success, rather than just listing job titles.
You can use Skima AI to create structured, skills-based job descriptions in seconds. The platform suggests relevant competencies based on your industry and job role. This helps you define the role using real-time talent intelligence.
Step 2: Publish Job Listings Across High-Visibility Platforms
Once the role is defined, it’s time to give it visibility. Posting to just one job board isn’t enough. To maximize reach, list your job on a mix of general platforms (like Indeed and LinkedIn), niche sites (such as Dribbble for designers or Wellfound for startups), and your company's careers page.
Candidates today search in numerous places, so meet them where they are. Skima AI simplifies this by allowing one-click job distribution to multiple platforms. Not only does it save you time, but it also tracks which channels bring in the best talent.
This helps you make informed decisions on where to invest your hiring budget and ensures you find employees through the most effective avenues.
Step 3: Leverage AI Search & Sourcing Tools
Now, you start getting hundreds of applications to review and find the best fit for your needs. That said, manual resume screening and Boolean searches are time-consuming and often miss great candidates.
However, you can use platforms like Skima AI to scan thousands of profiles in seconds to save time. Also, its matching score ranks the most qualified candidates with explanations of why they are a great fit.
It helps recruiters instantly identify candidates that match both technical criteria and cultural fit. This makes Skima AI a powerful solution for anyone wondering how to find workers efficiently.
Step 4: Ask for Referrals and Activate Employee Networks
Apart from job boards, referrals are one of the most effective ways to find employees who fit your culture. Employees tend to recommend people whose work styles and values align with the organization. This leads to quicker onboarding and improved retention.
To tap into one of the best ways to get employees, companies should actively promote their referral programs, not just mention them once in a handbook. Regularly remind your team through internal newsletters, Slack channels, or town halls.
Step 5: Engage Talent with Automated Personalized Outreach
To hire the right people, first identify strong candidates, then focus on how you reach out. In a competitive market, generic messages fail. Generic messages get ignored. Instead, outreach should be personalized, timely, and relevant to the candidate’s background.
At scale, this becomes challenging unless you have the right automation in place. Skima AI empowers you to send highly personalized outreach messages across channels (email, LinkedIn, etc.) with smart templates and scheduling tools.
It tracks engagement metrics like open rates and replies, which helps you refine your outreach strategy. This ensures your communication stands out and helps you convert more prospects into hires.
Step 6: Build a Talent Pool for Ongoing Hiring Needs
Don’t let great candidates disappear just because the timing isn’t right. Every hiring cycle should feed into a talent pool, a living database of people who might be a fit for future roles. Having a pre-qualified pipeline drastically reduces the time to hire.
With the help of Skima AI, you can segment and tag candidates based on role, skill set, seniority, and more. You can also automate periodic check-ins to keep your talent pool warm and engaged.
This proactive approach ensures you’re never starting from scratch and can consistently find employees on demand.
Step 7: Measure Which Channels Work Best for Sourcing
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Tracking where your best candidates come from, whether through job boards, referrals, or social media, helps you optimize your budget and focus on what works. Without data, recruitment becomes guesswork.
With Skima AI Analytics, you can monitor sourcing performance, candidate interactions, time to fill, application drop-offs, and campaign success.
These insights allow you to refine your strategy in real-time and invest in the most effective channels. For hiring teams looking to scale, it’s an essential tool for continuous improvement and smarter recruiting.
How to Find Employees on LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is more than just a job board, you can find employees who are active, engaged, and aligned with your industry. LinkedIn should be a key part of your hiring strategy. Here’s how to use it effectively:
1. Optimize Your Company and Career Page
Your LinkedIn page is often the first impression candidates have of your brand. Ensure it reflects your values, work culture, and open roles. Rich media like employee testimonials and office photos add credibility and build trust.
Moreover, you can integrate LinkedIn with Skima AI to sync the data and use AI's power to search the right employee in seconds.
2. Use Boolean Search and Advanced Filters
LinkedIn’s advanced search allows you to drill down by job titles, locations, industries, and more. Boolean operators help refine your results to surface exactly the kind of candidate you're looking for.
With Skima AI, you can combine Boolean logic with AI insights to instantly find and rank top candidates, saving you hours of manual work.
3. Personalize Your Outreach
Don’t just send cold InMails. Reference something from their profile, recent work, or shared connections. Personalized outreach receives far more responses.
LinkedIn gives you a competitive edge, but it’s just one piece of the puzzle. To truly maximize your reach, it’s important to explore other digital spaces where potential candidates spend their time, especially social media.
How to Find Employees on Social Media?
Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and even Twitter (X) have evolved into powerful talent attraction channels.
These platforms help you connect with candidates casually and authentically, ideal for roles in marketing, design, retail, and customer service. Here’s how to use them effectively:
1. Create Scroll-Stopping Employer Brand Content
On social media, it’s not job listings that perform best, it’s stories. Share content that humanizes your brand: team outings, employee spotlights, workplace milestones, or even “a day in the life” videos.
This kind of behind-the-scenes content attracts passive talent by giving them a feel for your culture before they ever see a job description.
You can track engagement, test content types, and build awareness around your hiring brand, automatically and at scale.
2. Run Targeted Recruitment Ads
Organic reach is great, but to attract specific roles or geographies, paid ads are key. Social platforms allow laser-focused targeting by job title, location, interest, behavior, and more.
Whether you’re hiring developers in Bangalore or retail staff in Mumbai, you can reach them with the right message at the right time.
With a better strategy, you can manage paid social campaigns from one place, complete with templates, performance analytics, and automated A/B testing to optimize reach and conversions.
3. Engage with Talent in Niche Online Communities
Some of the best talent hides in plain sight, inside Slack groups, Reddit threads, Discord servers, and Facebook communities focused on niche topics.
Join conversations genuinely, offer value, and share opportunities only when relevant. You’ll build relationships, not just transactions. It can also automate engagement tracking, so you know which communities are most responsive and worth investing in for future hiring.
Social media recruiting adds reach, personality, and speed to your hiring strategy. But it works best when combined with other channels for a holistic approach. Let’s explore those next.
Other Channels to Find Employees
While job boards and social media are essential, don’t overlook other high-value channels like:
- Campus Recruitment: Engage early talent through college partnerships and internship programs.
- Freelance Platforms: Hire and trial contractors from sites like Upwork, then transition top performers into full-time roles.
- Recruitment Agencies: Especially helpful for specialized or executive roles.
- Industry Events & Meetups: Attend or host events to meet candidates face-to-face.
- Online Talent Communities: Find engaged professionals in Slack groups, forums, or GitHub repositories.
Skima AI brings together your recruitment efforts across all these touchpoints. It makes tracking, communicating, and hiring easy from anywhere.
Summary - Hire Smarter, Not Harder in 2025
Hiring today demands precision, creativity, and the right tech stack. Every touchpoint, from how you define roles to how you source, engage, and convert talent, should work in sync.
That’s where Skima AI becomes your competitive edge. By turning fragmented hiring steps into a connected, intelligent workflow, Skima AI helps you move faster without compromising quality. It’s not just about filling roles, it’s about building teams that thrive.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are some creative ways to recruit employees?
Creative recruitment goes beyond job boards. Try hosting virtual hiring events, running interactive social media campaigns, gamifying your application process, or showcasing employee stories through video content. Tools like Skima AI help you scale these efforts by automating campaigns, tracking engagement, and reaching talent through unexpected channels.
2. Where can I find employees in 2025?
You can find employees through a combination of channels: LinkedIn, job boards, niche talent platforms, social media, referrals, online communities, and campus networks. For maximum efficiency, use Skima AI to centralize sourcing across all these touchpoints and identify which channels deliver the best candidates.
3. How do I find good employees for my company?
To find good employees, focus on role clarity, skills alignment, and cultural fit. Define the role well, reach out through the right platforms, and personalize your candidate experience. Skima AI helps you identify top talent based on skillsets, experience, and engagement patterns, ensuring quality over quantity.
4. How do I find and hire great employees, not just average ones?
Great employees are attracted to clarity, purpose, and opportunity. Define clear outcomes, build a strong employer brand, and offer a smooth, respectful candidate experience. With Skima AI, you can personalize outreach, automate follow-ups, and analyze what top-performing hires have in common.
