Where to Post Your Job: A Guide for Startup Recruiters

You’ve been tasked with sourcing high-quality candidates for your company, but do you have a plan to get in front of the right candidates?

Hiring and recruiting for a startup is more than writing a witty job posting and waiting for applicants to roll in. When you’re in the pivotal early stages, every hire you make will have an outsized impact on your company. It’s not enough to simply publish a job posting, you need to make sure it gets in front of the right audience.

In this guide, I’ll break down proven tactics you can use to improve your chances of bringing ideal candidates into your company.

Is Your Job Posting Going to Attract the Right Talent?

An effective job posting doesn’t start with a template, a jazzy headline, or a pun. It starts with a clearly identified need from your company and an ideal candidate profile that fills that need.

This is especially important given the costs associated with hiring: each hire can cost your company $4,700, and many spend 3-4x that amount. That’s nearly $5,000 just to get someone through your door. Before you write a single line of your job posting, I recommend you run through the following steps:

• Perform a needs assessment: This starts with building a strong business case for the hire. You need to sit down with your leadership team to define what this hire will enable your company to do, help you achieve, and determine the impact of the role and how you will measure its impact and success.
• Start with the ideal candidate in mind: Much like a marketer or sales rep will create an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) to focus their efforts, I recommend that founders, HR professionals, and recruiters identify an Ideal Candidate Profile. Not only does this focus your recruitment process and align your team on who to hire, it also focuses your efforts on where to post each job. When you know who you are looking for, it becomes much easier to find them.
• Write the job functions and required skills: For established roles in a larger company, this process can be routine. You know what other product managers, software engineers, or marketing managers do. You could simply copy and paste their job descriptions and find more candidates like them, but you can also interview people in similar or related roles inside your organization to develop a more complete and precise list of desired capabilities and attributes. For younger companies where one role could fill a few different needs, it’s important to map your job function and skills to your needs assessment.

Where to Post Your Job to Attract Startup Talent

• General job boards
• Startup-specific job boards
• Niche platforms

General Job Boards

General job boards can work, but remember… they are general. They cast a wide net and will get you in front of anyone looking for a job in your industry.

They may be popular with larger companies, but that’s because larger companies have the capacity to hire and train more people. In the early stages, you need to make sure you hire the right person, which means hiring through a generalist job board can feel like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

For earlier-stage companies, I’d recommend the other categories below. If you’re in the middle to late stages of growth, then try sites like:

• LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the #1 hiring platform globally with over 1 billion users. Almost everyone in the job market has a LinkedIn presence of some sort.
• Indeed: Another massively popular site, Indeed is effective in the US market and popular with junior to mid-level professionals.
• Glassdoor: Glassdoor is famous for allowing transparent feedback from existing employees on company culture and salary information, but it’s also a popular job site as well.
• Handshake: Very popular among students and college graduates, and great for hiring interns and fresh graduates. Many colleges in the US use Handshake to power their career services and job placement infrastructure, hence the popularity among early career professionals.

These platforms are fine solutions, but read on for more startup-specific places you can try.

Startup-Specific Job Boards

Looking for scrappy, hungry candidates ready to hit the ground running and sprint your company all the way to an IPO? Niche forums for hiring may be a better bet. These are a hotbed of startup activity where eager marketers, PMs, designers, engineers, and sales reps flock to find the latest opportunity.

Is every candidate perfect for your company? No. But this will get you in front of a smaller audience and is more likely to weed out people better suited for a more stable, larger company.

Startup job sites include:

• Wellfound (Angel List): AngelList (now Wellfound) is one of the most popular ways for applicants to find jobs at early-stage startups. This is a great way to build visibility for your company and find people ready for the roller coaster ride of the startup world.
• VentureLoop: Like Wellfound, VentureLoop is another job site primarily focused on startups. VentureLoop offers a wider range of job functions, company sizes, and locations.
• WeWorkRemotely: Looking to offer remote opportunities? WeWorkRemotely is a remote-only job board that can get you in front of potential hires looking for their next role.
• Authentic Jobs: While Authentic Jobs is not explicitly for startups, they are a popular job board for product and creative roles. Companies like Apple and Facebook have hired through them, though they can be a good fit for smaller startups as well.
• Startup Jobs: As the name suggests, Startup Jobs is a job board aimed at startups, big and small, from founding engineers at early-stage startups to roles at unicorns like Airbnb and Spotify.
• Welcome to the Jungle: One of my favorites. For one, all jobs are curated and vetted by the job board, giving more credibility to job seekers. Secondly, they have a job matching engine based on job seeker preference, so you can improve your chances of your posting being seen by the right people.

Again, just because you’re getting in front of an audience seeking out startup work does not mean every candidate will be a great fit. Check out my guide to hiring red flags to watch out for.

Niche Platforms

Want to get hyper-focused on your audience?

Beyond general “startup interest,” you can get even more niche by going where your ideal hires are. To do this, first determine what your ideal candidate profile is (ICP – like a marketing ICP). Then, brainstorm where they spend time online:

• Where do they hang out?
• Where do they network?
• Where do they look for career advice or opportunities?

For example, if you are hiring software engineers, then you might want to check out GitHub or Stack Overflow. If you are hiring marketers, then LinkedIn groups, Slack communities, or even Reddit might get you in front of good candidates. Don’t forget professional networks, as these can be a great way to source like-minded candidates.

How to Get Ideal Candidates to Apply

Once you’ve settled on where to post your job, here are a few tactics to improve your odds at ideal candidates applying:

• Lean into your network
• Show, don’t tell
• Go where candidates are
• Try something unique

Leverage Your Community

In the early stages, this is one of the most popular ways startups can recruit talent.

It won’t always scale as your company grows, however, you can continue to try to tap your network as well as incentivize employees to refer others from their network. As you grow into the scale-up phase, the monetary incentives can be quite high – for example, HubSpot launched a $30,000 referral bonus for engineers and designers.

If you have a high-performing core in your team, then they are a potential gold mine of quality candidates. Encourage them to act as brand ambassadors by sharing job openings and positive experiences online. Provide them with shareable posts, videos, or sample language to make it easy.

This can be especially effective for startups, as quality referrals typically lead to better culture fits and longer retention.

Show, Don’t Tell

Every company can post job descriptions claiming to be a fun work environment, but you can stand out from a sea of companies that more or less look and sound the same.

Things like:

• Events and happy hours
• Co-host or sponsor events with local and like-minded organizations
• “Days in the Life” videos
• Industry-specific or career growth meetups

And other tactics can help give a tangible look inside that can demonstrate your unique culture beyond a simple paragraph tacked onto a job posting.

Go Where Candidates Already Are

Beyond posting jobs where your candidates spend time online, why not show up in person too?

Consider participating in or sponsoring hackathons, industry meetups, and community events. These provide opportunities to meet potential candidates in their element and build relationships before you even have an opening. When in doubt, ask your existing team where they spend their time and the events they value. This can help you find candidates who match the profile of existing hires.

One word of caution: this is a great tactic for companies that are past the initial startup stage and have cash ready to invest in a recruitment pipeline. I wouldn’t recommend this tactic in the early stages of your company.

Make Your Application Process Unique

Want your job posting to stand out once applicants land on it?

Break the mold and do something a little different. Replace traditional cover letters with specific questions to gauge a candidate’s experience, perspective, or personality. Perhaps try application “challenges” to simulate real work and give candidates a taste of the role before making your decision.

You can even offer a paid trial project to provide a monetary incentive while giving your team a more realistic sense of an applicant’s abilities. Tactics like these can help you stand out from more commonplace job postings while also giving you a better sense of each potential hire.

4 Job Posting Mistakes to Avoid

Now that you have the right places to post your job and a few tactics to improve your odds of making the right hire, here are four common mistakes to avoid:

• Poorly written job descriptions: Beyond the basics like spellcheck, pay attention to the language you are using and the type of people it will attract. While buzzwords (like “ninja” or “rockstar”) may be popular ways to signal a fast-paced startup environment, they’re just that – buzzwords. It’s important to present your company in the most genuine and authentic way possible to clearly display who you are (and aren’t) to potential employees.
• Compensation ambiguity: I’ve always advocated for pay transparency. Ignoring compensation in the posting or posting unrealistically wide ranges can turn off high-quality candidates from your company.
• Poor articulation of your company culture: Conveying your company culture is about more than mentioning you have a ping pong table. It’s important that you clearly communicate your company mission, vision, and working styles to attract hires who are bought into your company and want to be part of growing it – not just employees of it.
• Misaligned channels: General job boards are fine, but you could be missing out on better-suited candidates by only posting to Indeed and LinkedIn. It’s also important to vary your posting strategy based on the role you are hiring for.

Avoid these mistakes and you’ll be set up for success in equipping your company with a winning team. Read on for a gift that can take your HR practices to the next level.

Hiring is Just One Part of HR: Download the Startup HR Survival Guide For the Rest

Hiring is a key piece of your startup’s success, but it’s only one element of HR.

The most successful startups know that their path to scaling from 7 to 9 figures will be made possible by the practices they follow to attract and retain top performers in their company.

I mapped out this and more in my Startup HR Survival Guide. In this free guide, you will learn:

• How HR can drive growth
• How to hire
• How HR evolves as your company grows
• And more!

Fill out the form below to download the free guide and put your company on the path to hypergrowth.