Recruiters say job boards like LinkedIn are dead. Here’s how to hire instead

The best recruiter I know is going to spend the next three months hiring without posting to a single job board website, like Indeed or LinkedIn.

“LinkedIn?” She laughed. “You mean Facebook for thought leaders? No, I won’t be using any of those sites.”

“Rosa” is head of HR for a large tech startup, and someone I trust to tell me what’s really going on in the world of professional recruiting and jobs—the unflinching truth. The last time we talked, she had finally taken back control of her company’s recruiting process, rescuing it from over-automation, misguided AI, and what she called “results-last” hiring. 

I’ve hired hundreds of people to work with me over my long career. And I’ve partnered with some great recruiters and some not-so-great recruiters along the way. I can tell you she has a point about LinkedIn, but it’s not just LinkedIn. Rosa wants to sidestep “the whole damn hiring system,” even down to how her company views hiring and talent.

“We were treating people like fuel when they’re actually critical machine parts,” she said. “Once you understand that, you realize the whole damn hiring system is broken, and the path becomes clear. Not easy, but at least clear.”

Her latest experiment, over the next three months, with her executive team behind her: Hire without LinkedIn and the rest of the job boards.

The Digital Job Funnel Is Not Going to Be Fixed Anytime Soon

On the other side of the country, a CTO friend of mine spent his holiday break clearing a backlog of support tickets. 

Why? 

Because a bunch of folks quit, and when he tried to replace them, the modern automated hiring systems his company was using kept throwing up roadblocks.

“Wasn’t that what all of this automation was supposed to do?” he asked me. “Find me people quickly?” 

He lost three support people the week before Christmas and figured he could get by with two. After getting “vague answers” from his HR team, the last day before everything shut down for the holidays, he went full White Goodman and took the bull by the horns.

“I got into the system myself, thought I’d be a hero, and I spent hours going through stacks of applications just trying to filter out the bots, or the résumés that weren’t even close to what I needed. I wondered if I should just write some code to filter [the applications] myself, but I was running out of time and [support] tickets were piling up. I gave up and said I’d just handle the tickets on my own over the holidays.”

After a holly jolly Jira holiday, he had an epiphany. 

“This never should have happened,” he said. “We’re going to take a hard look at why we have all this hiring technology.”

It’s Always the Quiet Ones

In my last column, I speculated that we’re reaching a bottom in the job market, especially in tech, where a sense of capitulation has leaders in the recruiting industry advising tech employees to become “baristas, bartenders, and builders.”

Yeah, that’s the right amount of capitulation. 

I mentioned in that column that, out of the dozen or so SMB tech startup leaders I’ve talked to while going down this particular hiring rabbit hole, not one of them is using a major hiring channel to fill their talent needs.

In their view, the LinkedIns, the Indeeds, basically all the job boards, have devolved into an automated slippery slope that, in their eyes, produces no signal, just noise. A lot of noise. 

‘We’re Hiring,’ Just Without the Purple Sash

So these companies are opting out. They’re posting jobs on their own websites, or sometimes not, and using their current employees’ and investors’ networks of networks to find channels. They’re going through traditional but smaller recruiters, trade associations, user groups, colleges for entry-level positions, even niche online communities like Reddit and Hacker News. 

They’re going through me, not to hire me, but asking if I know anyone who knows anyone who would be perfect for the role, like they used to before LinkedIn ate all of hiring—which is right before LinkedIn decided there was more money in letting ambitious professionals post AI-written opinions on everything. 

Oh, sorry, before you ask me who these companies are, I’d love to tell you, and I am telling people whom I think they might find a perfect fit, but if I splash their names here it defeats the purpose of what they’re trying to do. They’re “tightening the aperture,” as one put it, which sounds uncomfortable, but is really just a way of saying they want 100 targeted résumés for an open position and not 10,000 résumés that are mostly people who didn’t read the job requirements plus bots.

Crazy, right? But oddly enough, with the sheer volume of talent already on the sidelines, they’re filling these roles much more quickly than they did using LinkedIn, Indeed, and such.

So, no, I can’t out them, but I can tell you this. Based on how Rosa and her low-tech colleagues are hiring, here’s my best advice for joining this worldwide loose hiring network.

Turn Your Friends Into Recruiters

Good old-fashioned networking is back in vogue. And this isn’t just about blasting an email asking everyone you know if they know anyone who knows anyone who is hiring. You want to build an army, a group of folks who will work for you.

“Be specific about what you can do and what you want,” Rosa told me. “A personal, concise message is best. Your friends are already willing to help you, they just need to know how they—specifically—can do that. It’ll be different for everyone.”

Take Time to Do Deeper Company Research 

Smart companies are, like Rosa said, looking for “critical machine parts,” not fuel. They need talent, not labor. They want results, not butts in seats.

Your best shot is going to be finding a company that can use you, right away, to get the results they need. Use AI to find these companies that are sidestepping these channels, instead of using AI to turn your résumé into one more needle in an ever growing haystack. 

Then, instead of sending an application to 50 companies if you might be a fit for five, find 50 companies where you would be valuable and hope that five of them are hiring, whether they have a job posted for you or not.

Look for Positive Proof That the Job They Have Is for You

When you do find a job that looks right, dig a little. Is it real? Is it what it says it is? Are you going to be dumped into an applicant pool with thousands of other candidates? 

Then dig a little deeper. Read the job description with some skepticism. Is it generic? Is it a carbon copy of all the others you’ve seen? Are they hiring just because they have fresh money? Is it more about joining a club than getting results?

On that last one: “Companies will do that when they have a lot of problems but they don’t know what they need,” said Rosa. “Instead of a finely tuned job description, they’ll spend a lot of time on values and goals and what they believe. They’re hiring fans, not talent.”

And finally, focus on companies that move quickly. The truth is there is still a huge supply of available talent out there, thus there’s no need for a hiring company to wait for the right fit. If there’s no urgency, the company might be just testing the waters or, again, not really sure of what they need. Neither of those aspects works in your favor.

Don’t Fall For False Progress

These are desperate times in the job market. I know there will be counterarguments to these strategies, probably led by “Well, that’s nice advice, but I need a job now.”

Here’s the thing. “Job now” is more about luck than reach. Scanning or spamming job board websites might feel like progress, but we’ve gone so far down the digital black hole of hiring that a lot of the companies that are hiring now, quickly, and for the right reasons, are bypassing those job boards entirely. 

I’m not talking about “Easy Apply” and I’m not suggesting these strategies will speed the process. I’m talking about adding a growing channel that isn’t getting attention because it doesn’t want the attention. They’re not going to find you. You’ll need to find them.

I can also speculate that these companies won’t stay in the shadows for long. The success of this loose network will get noticed, and it will get centralized, maybe not with AI, but it won’t be long before Rosa and all the recruiters like her are up to their eyeballs in tens of thousands of applications again. 

So now is a good time to go job “hunting” instead of job “scrolling.” 

Now is also a good time to join my email list, a growing rebel alliance of professionals who want a different perspective on tech and business.

—Joe Procopio

This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc.

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